Jane Ashworth, Office Administrator

January may be a quiet month for some but in the office it is very busy…

To kick start the year we have restarted our water chart challenge in the office. We each record how many bottles of water we drink each day tallying up how many litres we have per week. It is a great way to stay hydrated and a bit of fun! Last year I managed to drink 219L of water, not sure how I managed!

After being off for two weeks holiday I had lots to catch up with ….

An insight of my weekly job are processing purchase & sales invoices, which involves each invoice being coded and allocated to the correct enterprise. I also post sales from the butchery, reconciling the card payments and raise any invoices for our wholesale customers. At the end of each month I process the credit cards for the farm. Now this can be a challenge trying find receipts from spontaneous purchases! I also do a monthly reconciliation of the livestock we have on the farm, fortunately I do not need to go and count all the animals. I make sure the animals we have on Agriwebb, our livestock management program, matches the stock on the accounts program. In the next few weeks we start calving which is an exciting time as we see new life and our herd of Lincoln Reds grow.

I am currently working on setting up an e-commerce site for Butchery at Bowhouse, something that I have never done before. I have been working with the website developers to find out what the best systems would be for them and what would work in the Butchery. One of the biggest challenges is managing stock online and in the Butchery shop, so we are look at difference solutions to hopefully make sure we are able to manage stock effectively.

One thing I have learned in terms of stock in the butchery is how much of the carcass weight is lost during the aging process of beef. It does come at a cost however the end product is a better quality as during the dry aging process the flavour increases and the texture of the meat becomes tender.

Looking to the next few weeks, the Balcaskie team have a walk and talk with Jeremy who looks after the environmental and wildlife aspect of the estate. Jeremy is busy planting hedge rows on the estate so it will be really interesting to see all the different types of hedge plants as I usually only see the names on the invoices. In the office this week we have GDPR training and the second part of our customer service training to complete. I will also be looking at the quarterly budgets, comparing the actuals against the budget figures that was set out for this financial year. As we are now in the last quarter of the financial year we will start to look at the budgets for next financial year – let the planning begin!