Time is money
17-12-2019Agriterra supports the development of a cloud accounting system for the dairy farmers’ association of Yapacaní (Bolivia) to save time, reduce errors and promote strategic thinking.
ASOPLE is a Bolivian dairy farmers’ association with more than 300 members in the region of Yapacaní. ASOPLE collects daily close to 70,000 liters of milk in cooling tanks in five collection centers and after cooling the milk below 5 oC the association transports the milk by truck to the industries. Additionally, the association offers value added services to their members with a team of veterinarians, laboratory and stores to sell groceries, fodder and veterinarian supplies in the collection centers dispersed within a radius of 30km.
The employees in each collection center collect the milk twice a day and sell groceries, fodder and veterinarian supplies to the dairy farmers. This flow of commercial activities, in the past, created more than a thousand hand-made bills per day. Therefore, every week, tens of thousands of hand-made bills were sent to the accounting department to be typed into the accounting software, leading to many typos and mistakes which had to be supervised and fixed by the general manager. In the end, the accounting department had no time to prepare the financial statements and reports, so they were externalized, and the general manager spent most of her day amending mistakes instead of leading the association, which semi-paralysed the organisation.
ASOPLE’s old accounting system
To improve this situation Agriterra supported ASOPLE to develop a new cloud accounting system.
The new structure includes computerising the five collection centers to issue electronic and printed bills. The electronic bills are uploaded to the cloud given that, now, all the collection centers have internet access through a system of antennas installed by ASOPLE. While the printed bills are given to the dairy farmer after each transaction.
With all the bills uploaded in the cloud the accounting department just has to download the data to the new accounting system which automatically organises the information, with an impressive amount of time saved. Now the accountant, instead of typing data, prepares the financial reports and the general manager, instead of correcting typos, analyses the financial data to make strategic decisions, activities for which both have received specific training with Agriterra during the past two years.
With their brand new cloud accounting system ASOPLE is saving many hours of work and it can focus on the real problems of their farmers like how to increase the quantity and the quality of the milk produce.
ASOPLE’s new accounting system
Guido Guerra
Business Advisor in Bolivia
