An app built by two cousins from Scotland is set to consign a huge part of the farm office administrative burden to the wastepaper basket.

Farmers John and James Fairlie have developed Yokit, a mobile and desktop platform which replaces hand-written timesheets, holiday forms and vital invoicing information with one simple system that the whole team can access.

Operators log jobs as they go in order for managers to see live costs and generate invoices for work completed. The data feeds into detailed reports which can be created to assess fuel efficiency, equipment hours, and labour costs, providing an up-to-the-minute picture of a farm's performance.

Integration with the most common accounting software used on farm allows invoices to customers to be generated in seconds.

"Farming has adopted all kinds of advanced precision technology to grow the best possible crop and rear the best animal," says co-founder John Fairlie. "But so many farm offices are being run with pens, paper and guesswork. Yokit pulls all that together in one secure place. Every job entered builds a live picture of what's happening across the business. You can see where time and money are going, and you can make decisions based on facts rather than your guy or your memory."

The app was born from the pair's own frustrations with running family farms in Angus. John manages Balmirmer Farms, a mixed enterprise with potatoes, cereals, oilseed rape, breeding ewes and a suckler herd. James runs Fairlie Farms, centred on potatoes and combinable crops, plus a 500-kilowatt biogas plant.

From looking at their own businesses, and that of their peers, both saw how much time was lost to poor record-keeping and missing job tickets. James says the need for change became obvious during contracting work.

"If one of my operators was out drilling or ploughing for a neighbour, I'd get a note scrawled on a bit of paper, and two weeks later I'd be trying to remember what it meant, and how much I said I would charge," he says. "Now everything goes straight into Yokit in the field. The data's there, the invoice goes out faster, and everyone's paid correctly. It saves hours every week."

Smart efficiency in real time

Yokit's strength lies in the way it turns daily work logs into usable data. Each entry from an operator or member of staff captures parameters such as fuel use, area covered and equipment used.

Reports can be used to quickly identify inefficiencies or anomalies that need investigation. A history of what happened in each field every year is automatically built and stored as data is entered.

"In one instance we had two ploughs doing the same job but one tractor was using six litres of fuel per hectare more than the other," said James. "A quick tweak of the settings fixed it. That's money straight back in the business."

Built by farmers, designed for teams

Yokit was created over several years using live data from the founders' own farms. Every feature has been tested by real operators. The interface uses drop-down fields to prevent typing errors and make it fast to log a job, even with muddy hands. Operators only see their own work records, while managers retain control of financial data and reporting.

"Ease of use is everything," says John. "If the people in the field can't use it, it won't work. We built Yokit so that anyone can pick it up and use it confidently from day one, regardless of age or technical competency. All they need is access to the app on their phone or laptop."

Security and reliability

All data is encrypted and stored on Amazon Web Services' cloud infrastructure, backed up across multiple sites. Nothing can be lost if a phone is damaged or a computer crashes. "Your data is safer in Yokit than in a filing cabinet," says John.

Yokit is available now for Apple and Android devices. Farmers can sign up for a free trial at www.yokit.app.