Simplified record keeping for contractors

Hamburgers and John Deere

Business owners, and especially farmers, know the importance of not putting all their eggs in one basket, with business diversification a goal of many. It’s not often though that you see someone who runs contract boom sprayers as well as a Sonic Drive-In restaurant, but for Oakley, KS based Calder Keller this is a reality. Having grown up on a family feed yard, agriculture has always been important to Calder’s life but, when Calder recognized the opportunities presented by Interstate 70 which runs right by Oakley, he decided to open a Sonic Drive-In in 2017 which he still owns and runs now.

In addition to operating the restaurant, Calder continued to work for his family’s agricultural enterprises, and in 2020 got the opportunity to take over a spray set-up from his uncle, which enabled him to get into the contract liquid application business. Starting his first year in business with just 1 machine, Calder has already had to double capacity going into his second season he says: “I started with just a 1,000gal, 120ft John Deere R4038 boom sprayer and after the first season I bought a 1,200gal, 120ft John Deere R4045 as well. I picked up enough business in the first year that I could rationalize buying a second machine, and I want to make sure I can keep providing my clients with the top-notch service they have come to expect from me, so I don’t want to cut it too close with my capacity.”

It’s this high service level that Calder aims for, that spurred him to evaluate digital tools that can assist with field record keeping and an accurate invoicing process, according to Calder: “It’s my goal to bring a little more value to the table for my clients than somebody else will, and so I make sure I live up to that with everything I do. We do what we say we do, we take care of our clients, and we do a good job. Part of that job is invoicing, which I often notice from bigger, incumbent operators to be very cumbersome and vague, and so I wanted to make sure I excel with that as well, which is one of the reasons why I decided to start utilizing Agworld.”

Implementing Agworld

KelTek provides liquid application services throughout the cropping season for approximately 80,000 acres in the local area, with the majority of those acres divided between corn and milo, and some wheat and irrigated soybeans as well. Calder: “It’s just myself and two employees who take care of this; we have 1 full-time sprayer operator next to myself and one guy that operates the tender truck and he also takes care of our maintenance and repairs. What this means for me though is that I don’t have a lot of spare time to do paperwork and organize the invoicing, so I have to make sure that our systems are set up so that the invoicing part of our business is quick and easy - this is where Agworld helps us a lot.”

Calder continues: “After looking at a number of different software options available, I found that Agworld’s offline available app was the real differentiator and so I decided to join the Agworld platform. We now have an iPad with Agworld in both boom sprayers and both my employees and myself use it for everything we do. As soon as we are done with a field we go into Agworld, create a new actual and fill out all information such as product applied, which machine and operator did the job, weather details, etc. and sync it to the cloud. I think it’s great that Agworld’s offline capability allows us to create the actual record as soon as we’re done with a field, as you’ll always get less accurate if you wait longer with entering the data.”

Creating invoices

Creating accurate and timely invoices for his clients is key for Calder, and since he started to use Agworld he says this has been easy for him to achieve: “It’s not good business practice to be behind on invoicing as that just creates cash flow problems for my own business but, at the same time, I don’t want to rush things and create wrong invoices as that will just cause animosity with my clients. Because we create our field records in Agworld, we have a solid base of information at our disposal to create our invoice from.”

Calder elaborates: “At the end of each month, which is my billing period, I go to each customer in Agworld and print a monthly report that’ll show all line items, and the cost of each line item. So this report shows the acres that we’ve covered, the cost, and all other pertinent information. From there, it’s easy for our bookkeeper to create the invoices in QuickBooks or use it for our other business reporting.”

Calder concludes: “I don’t think that many people who are passionate about operating machinery and running a business, like myself, are passionate about record keeping, invoicing and other paperwork. So, to me that means that I have to use the best software available to help me take care of this part of my business, which is Agworld. Agworld was recommended to me by someone who also works in the contract application business, and I would recommend Agworld to any of my contracting colleagues just the same!”