Implementation · 42 working days
We move you across. You keep farming.
A farm cannot stop for a software project — the cows are milked at five whatever the go-live date. So the implementation is a written plan with named milestones and a sign-off at the end of each stage: the same document our delivery team works to, not a summary of it.
5 phases, 42 working days
22 of them are the implementation proper; the rest is the watch after go-live, which spans a month-end on purpose. The durations are what the plan allows, not a promise about your calendar: the phase that loads your farm is the one that stretches, and the scoping answers in the first phase are what decide by how much. You are told that before you sign, not during it.
- 01
Scoping and discovery
5 working daysEverything that has to be true before anybody touches a system: which farms, which enterprises, whose Xero, and what the old way looks like.
- Kick-off and scope confirmation
- The onboarding questionnaire
- Data audit
- 02
The operation set up
4 working daysThe tenant, the people, the roles and the gate. Nothing above this works until it is right, and all of it is data — no code is written for a client.
- Tenant provisioning
- People, roles and value visibility
- The plan and its gate
- Xero connection
- 03
The farm loaded
8 working daysThe client’s actual land, stock and seasons, in the app. This is the phase that stretches, and the scoping answers are why.
- Farms, fields and the map
- Herds, animals and the opening count
- Crop seasons in flight
- Suppliers, customers and opening stock
- The budget and its programmes
- Data migration
- 04
Training and go-live
5 working daysThe week that decides whether any of the above gets used: the office on the web, the field on the phone and WhatsApp, and the day the old way stops.
- Office training
- Field capture rollout
- Go-live
- The first week
- 05
After go-live
20 working daysIt spans a month-end on purpose. The first Xero reconciliation and the first SARS pack are the real test.
- Stabilise
- First month-end
- Handover and close
What we need from you
4 things only you can do
Everything else is ours. These are the ones that stop an implementation when they are late, so they are named up front rather than discovered in week three.
Someone to consent to the Xero connection. A person has to click Allow in a browser, on your Xero organisation. It cannot be scripted, delegated or done by us — and it is the single most common reason a go-live slips.
Three named contacts. Someone who can decide, someone who runs the day, and someone from the books. One person can wear two hats; nobody can wear none.
Your farms and fields as you actually work them. Field names, camps, sizes and what is in each — not an idealised version. Every herd, season, application and budget line hangs off the field register, and renaming a field after the first season is loaded means restating figures people have already seen.
A cut-off date, agreed in writing. The day the old spreadsheet stops. Without one, both run in parallel forever and neither is trusted — which is the commonest way an implementation fails while every step is ticked.
Your data
What comes across, and what deliberately does not
Loading the farm is a phase of its own with its own milestones. The rules below are the product's, not a service promise — the import enforces them whoever is doing the loading.
Nothing is invented from an import.
An unmatched row is named, never guessed. A supplier the import would create is the one that forks your directory, so half the orders go to one “Afgri” and half to the other.
You see the preview before the write.
Every importer shows what it will create and what it will skip, with the reason against each skipped row, before anything is written.
A blank stays blank.
A blank is not a zero. An unmeasured field and a field measured at nothing are different facts, and only one of them is a number.
The opening count is a movement.
A herd’s head count as at the cut-off is captured as an opening movement, so the First Schedule numbers are right from day one rather than from the first birth you record.
Xero is read back, not trusted.
The first sync pushes nothing. It reads your chart of accounts and tracking categories so the mappings are yours, and every later write is compared to what Xero actually holds.
Your data leaves as easily as it arrived.
Every register exports as CSV, and the bulk export belongs to the operation. That is a property of the product, not a favour at the end of a contract.
How a stage closes
Signed, or signed with exceptions — and both are clean
A stage almost never closes with everything finished. A form that only accepts “all clear” does not produce clean stages; it produces people ticking a box they know is not true, and the open item then lives in somebody's memory until the final meeting.
The exit criteria are the stage’s own milestones
There is deliberately no second list. A stage’s criteria and its milestones would be two statements of one thing, and the first time they disagreed nobody would know which one was the gate. So the criteria are the milestones, filtered to what your plan bought: a Starter implementation has no opening stock to load, and that is not required, never left undone.
Every exception has an owner and a date
A stage signed with exceptions lists them, each with who will close it and by when. A stage that is not signed records the reason — the only useful part of a refusal. Go-live is the one stage with no exceptions allowed on the four things only you can do: the Xero consent, the contacts, the field register and the cut-off date.
Start with your own farm.
The demonstration estate shows the product; the implementation starts with your herds, your fields and your Xero file, so the thing you judge it on is your own operation.