Financial Planning

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The Financial Picture

With HortiBench there are no more financial estimates. HortiBench will calculate exactly what your nursery's financial results will be. First of all the planned turnover. Every plant variety can be given a sales price. Not just one price, but a price which can vary for every week of the year. This way HortiBench reflects market prices. From the weekly plant availability and these varying prices HortiBench calculates your expected turnover. Next come the costs, material costs, labour costs and overheads. HortiBench calculates the material and labour costs from the requirements explained earlier. It can do this because you can enter in HortiBench the cost price of every unit of growing material and the cost price of the different labour categories. The last cost category, the overheads, are entered separately into HortiBench. You can enter here anything from heating, electricity and office staff to the management costs. All these figures are calculated and totalled by HortiBench into the Financial Results report. Not only the financial result but also the cash requirements can be read from this report. Your bank manager will certainly be impressed. To analyse the contribution a certain variety or specie had to the nursery result you can print the Profitability report. This report shows in chart form the cost build-up of the variety and its contribution towards the total financial result.

Cash Flow and Liquidity Planning

Difficult economical times and cut throat competition make knife edge costing and pricing very important for the nursery manager. In HortiBench we have extended the financial planning and analysis possibilities. There are new charts, reports and models to tweak. A tight cash flow planning is important when you are doing your production planning. To make the financial planning more realistic you can enter a delay between delivery and payment of sales to your customers, a delay between material requirements and payment of your suppliers. In addition you can also enter an interest rate for your cash requirements during the growing season. All these factors together will show a realistic cash flow prognosis on a weekly timescale.

Cost Price Analysis

Nursery overheads can be entered for every month of the year and can then be accounted to your batches according to several models you can select. You can divide them straight over the number of units or batches you grow in any week. You can also choose to account them according the spaceweeks figure of each batch. The spaceweeks figure indicates how much space during how many weeks a batch uses on your nursery. The final cost price for every batch or variety includes the plant material costs, the labour costs and these space or overhead costs.

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Profitability Analysis

HortiBench has many new profitability analysis possibilities. Sales prices for each variety can be set as a weekly fluctuating price or as a fixed annual price. With the flexible costing explained before, you can now analyse the profitability of a specific batch, an individual variety, a plant group, or the nursery as a whole.

Profit Contribution

The profit contribution of a selected group of plants to the profit of the whole nursery can also be shown. You can further analyse the profit contribution of a species to the total profit of a plant group.