Tips for ag advisors: Getting producers to actually finish their emissions report

Sit with enough producers trying to get through their emissions report and you'll notice the platform's rarely what's actually holding things up. Once someone's in there entering numbers, it moves along fine enough. What decides whether that report gets finished, or sits half done for another six months, comes down to something that happens well before anyone opens the platform at all (and it remains a sticking point whole way through as well).

A lot of it comes down to whether the report feels like it belongs alongside the admin a producer's already doing, or whether it feels like something extra bolted on top. A report that gets talked about next to tax time, or folded into an annual chat with the bank or the accountant, tends to get finished without much fuss. A report that gets treated as its own separate project, with its own appointment and its own explanation, tends to sit there half done for a lot longer, even when the actual numbers going in are exactly the same either way.

That's not a decision that gets made once and then it's set. It shows up again every time the thing comes up after that first conversation. A producer hits a number they don't have on hand, or the total comes back higher than they expected and they want to know why, or a year rolls round and they're deciding whether it's worth doing again. Every one of those moments either reminds them the report's part of their normal admin or reminds them it's separate to it. Keep it feeling like the first one and you'll get a lot further than trying to talk anyone out of being nervous about the number itself.

There's a second thing that comes up almost every time producers talk about what actually slows them down too, and it's less about the report itself and more about finding the information that goes into it. Fuel receipts in one spot, fertiliser invoices in another, numbers already held by the accountant or living in someone else's system entirely. Producers describe entering the numbers as the easy bit once they're sitting there doing it. Finding all the numbers in the first place, before they've even started, is where most of the actual grind is. Anything that cuts down that hunting matters more than most people give it credit for, and it's something we keep an eye on closely as the platform keeps developing.

If you're set up as a Ruminati service provider, you're in a decent spot to help with both of those things, drafting a chunk of a client's report from what you already hold on file, then getting them in to check it over rather than starting cold. If you're not set up yet and want a look at what that involves, give us a yell at hello@ruminati.com.au.