Dealers gathered for a 60-minute roundtable discussion — at the 2025 Precision Farming Dealer Summit — on best billing practices for the dealership and the customer. Broc Finch, director of ag technology at Parallel Ag served as the roundtable moderator. Afterwards, he shared the following key takeaways, suggestions and insights gleaned from the discussion.

• One of the things we talked about was on a lot of equipment that we sell, adding a line item saying, “You’re getting the support package. This is value; however, it’s at no charge because you’re buying this piece of iron.” Therefore, as years pass and we continue to go out to this farm to do the startup every single year, when they forget, we’re able to say, “Hey, when you first bought this piece of equipment, this was the value. Now that value is being billed to you through this billing system.”

• Then we talked about, “OK, so when we send the bill, what are some things about the bill that we need to make sure happen?” If you’re going to bill somebody for your time, it needs to be immediate, so they remember the service you provided. They remember how much you help them, and it’s not 2-3 months later when it’s out of sight, out of mind, and they’re wondering why they’re getting this bill.

• How do you get some additional buy-in from your salespeople? Sharing what our value is to our salespeople, talking about what we do and the value we add. Then also doing the same with our customers. If you have resistance from your precision team on billing, how do you show them or paint the vision for them? One is through an incentive program, but also maybe sharing with them some of the monotonous calls that they get and how maybe billing the customer or establishing that sort of relationship with them will help free up more time so they can help other customers. 

• At the end of the day, it’s not black and white. I don’t think anybody wants to hide behind a policy or procedure. It’s just making sure that you have that constant conversation with your team about having a better ROI on what those billed hours are.

Click here for more Roundtable Recaps from the 2025 Precision Farming Dealer Summit.