[fluid]Back in 1992 when manual payroll was the norm, electronic accounting packages were in their infancy and only your accountant had access to them, Lucia started working with the owners of a property employing itinerant workers. Initially retained just to take care of their payroll, she helped the owners put procedures in place to manage accountability, getting workers details, ensuring times were correctly recorded and that accurate payments were made. Once that aspect of the farm was systemised and fully functional next Lucia helped them to manage and implement procedures for all their accounts, creditors, debtors, bank reconciliations, cash flows etc.

Eighteen months later the farm owners asked Lucia to set up a system to manage their new packing shed co-operative comprising several primary producers including themselves. The system monitored whose produce was sold to which agents so that when the money came in it was correctly allocated. Initially she set up a manual system and once that was up and running she calculated that the cost to the producers was five cents/carton, a significant expense to the co-operative.

Recognising that this amount of expenditure to correctly track the flow of produce and payments was detrimental to the long term viability of the co-operative Lucia worked with a software programmer to develop a industry specific monitoring system that reduced the tracking cost/carton to one cent/carton.

This represented an 80% cost reduction.

The members of the co-operative agreed to fund the development of the program and today 22 years later they are still using that same software. Imagine the number of cartons of produce through the co-operative in that time. Even if only a nominal number of cartons went through the co-operative the $ saving to the members of the co-operative over that time would be many ‘000’s and the cost/carton would have increased upwards from 5 cents without the computerised system due to increasing labour and overhead expenses.[/fluid]