Two hours a report, down to ten minutes
A South Island dairy consultancy
Reports still go out the same day. He is no longer writing them at night to make that happen.
The situation: good reports, written late at night
A dairy consultant visiting five to ten farms a week, with around thirty farms on his books. Every visit produces a report for the farmer: the season’s numbers alongside his findings and recommendations.
The numbers were never the problem. The writing was. Each report took upwards of two hours to put together, and that work happened after the day’s visits were done. He was committed to getting the report to the farmer the same day, while the visit was still fresh for both of them, so the writing happened at night.
In busy stretches, with two visits a day, that meant several hours of typing after an already long day on farm.
The content itself was already good. He had been writing these reports for years and had his own structure, phrasing and a library of standard paragraphs he reused. The problem was purely the typing.
What we built: talk it through, read it over, send it
A phone app that turns a spoken account of a farm visit into a finished, branded report.
- He picks the farm and talks through the visit, usually two or three minutes, often from the ute before leaving the gate.
- The recording is transcribed and formatted into his own structure and phrasing, using instructions built from his existing reports.
- He reads it over and corrects anything the system did not quite catch: about five minutes.
- On approval, the season’s figures and the findings page merge into one PDF, page-numbered and branded, and go to that farm’s contacts automatically.
- If he spots a wrong figure or remembers a point on the drive home, he can rebuild the report without recording again.
- Reports send immediately, or are held and sent together in the evening.
Anything that needed a judgement call was left with him. Nothing sends without his approval, and the system flags where it is unsure rather than guessing. A wrong word in a report that reads correctly would otherwise reach a farmer unchallenged.
The result: roughly ten working weeks a year
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| Time per report | Upwards of 2 hours | About 10 minutes |
| When it got written | At night, after the visits | Before leaving the farm gate |
| When the farmer got it | Same day | Same day |
At six reports a week across forty working weeks, that is around 430 hours a year: about ten working weeks back in the business.
Figures based on the client’s own estimate of two hours per report before, against two to three minutes recording plus five minutes reviewing now. Assumes six reports a week over forty weeks, the conservative middle of his five to ten range.
What it runs on: his own tools, no new subscription
Built entirely inside the Microsoft 365 and Azure setup he already pays for. No new software subscription, no per-seat licence for a product he would have to learn, and nothing for a non-technical business owner to renew or maintain.
Running costs are around a dollar a month.
Every piece he might reasonably want to change himself (the instructions that shape how his findings are written, his library of standard paragraphs, the wording of the email that goes out) sits in plain files in his own storage, editable without a developer.
In his words
“A report used to take me two hours, and I’d be doing it at night to get it out the same day. Now I talk it through before I leave the gate, spend five minutes tidying it up, and it’s gone.”
Dairy farm consultant, South Island
If your business runs on reports, quotes or write-ups that eat your evenings, this is the shape of the fix. Get a quick business audit to see where yours might be.