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Text-based instructions - Video script

- Once you've entered all that information you will be taken through to the report for the Farm Business Snapshot. 
- You'll note in the top left hand corner here, you can download the report. You can download it as a PDF or you can put it into Excel. This will enable you to provide these data to other people. 
- You can also share your Snapshot with other people by inviting them here, entering their email address, and then selecting the type of access.
- View only means they can look at the data, view and edit means they can see your snapshot and can also make changes to your snapshot. 
- You will also note that there are links through to DairyBase and the Milk Value Tool. 
- There is also a PDF document that will provide to you with some additional information about benchmarking. 
- When you come down into the report, you will see that you can make changes to the financial year and the region. If you want to look at the benchmark data for a different financial year or for a different region. Within the report, there's a cash report and if you scroll down further there's also a profit report. You will also see that you can look at your data in actual dollars which is the actual income and expenses for the farm but you can also look at it as an efficiency measure against the milk solids produced, litres produced, number of cows on farm, the milking hectares you have.
If for example, I choose the dollars per kilo of milk solids. What this report is doing is lining the farmer up, I have just entered, against the benchmark data to Gippsland for the 2019/20 year. 
- Middle column is the average and the right-hand side is the top 25%. This is the benchmark data from the dairy monitor project. These traffic lights are an indication of how you're performing against the benchmark. A green traffic light indicates that you are performing better than the top 25% your region. Orange or amber traffic light indicates that you're performing between averaged and the top 25 percent and a red traffic light indicates that you're not performing as well as average in your region. You need to be mindful when looking at these traffic lights that there is some interpretation required. For example, if I look at animal health for example if I had a green traffic light here it could indicate one of two things. It might say that I really good with my herd and really good at managing animal health, in which case my costs are low. On the other hand, if I had a green traffic light here, it may also indicate that I should be spending more money in this area and that might actually improve herd health and improve my overall profitability. So if for example I come down and I see here that fertiliser has a green traffic light because it's well below the top 25% for that region. This could indicate a couple of things. It might indicate that the soil fertility of my property is really good and I'm just needing to put on nitrogen to maintain pasture production but it could also indicate that I'm underspending on fertiliser and therefore not maximising the home grown feed on my farm. This may mean that I've got the ability to grow more feed and possibly increase profit. While the traffic lights are an extremely good indicator of how you are performing against the benchmarks performance you do need to interpret them carefully.
- There is further information about that in the PDF download that you can access through the tool which gives some additional information about the fact that it's best to bench mark your business year on year, it is also extremely helpful to look at benchmark data against region benchmarks, but you need to interpret that data carefully before making any assessment and decisions about your business.
- You can look at all of this information on any of these efficiency measures, depending on which way you like to look at the data and interpret it. You can share the information with a service provider at any time, if you would like further feedback and assistance from them about what you can do in your business. Once you’ve got a few snapshots you can come back to your dashboard and all of the data set you own, will appear in the top section.