Australian Farming Services Outgrew Xero. NetSuite Was the Answer for Their Growing Needs.

AFS is one of Australia’s largest almond producers and one of its most ambitious. In under a decade, they built a fully vertically integrated operation from the ground up.

Founded in 2017, Australian Farming Services is an institutional farmland management company specialising in the development, growing, and processing of almonds. Managing over 4,500 hectares across New South Wales and Victoria, AFS has grown three orchards, Agusta, Cadell, and Canally, to early maturity and positioned itself as a significant force in the global almond market.

The Murray Downs Processing facility, which became operational in April 2024, is the centrepiece of that ambition. With an initial capacity of 17,500 tonnes and a design that allows expansion to 35,000 tonnes, the plant houses the Southern Hemisphere’s largest almond dryer and brings the full value chain, from orchard to packaged product, under one roof.

A new processing plant. A growing workforce. Institutional investors requiring USD reporting. The business AFS was becoming needed infrastructure Xero simply couldn’t provide.

As the Murray Downs Processing Plant neared completion, AFS faced a significant operational inflection point. Transaction volumes were set to increase substantially, inventory management would become far more complex, and grower settlements needed to be calculated and distributed across three farm entities accurately and at scale.

AFS’s existing finance stack, anchored by Xero, was not built to scale with the business it was becoming. Many core processes were still manual, finance functions were yet to be fully defined, and the incoming processing operation would demand a level of system integration, auditability, and multi-entity reporting that Xero simply could not provide. With an institutional investment group already running NetSuite globally and requiring consolidated, multi-currency reporting, the pressure to modernise was both operational and structural. AFS engaged OneKloudX to deliver a solution before the processing plant came online.

Where the Gaps Were:

“We were heading into a significant expansion, new processing facility, new markets, new investor reporting requirements, and our finance systems simply weren’t going to keep up. We needed a platform that could consolidate seven entities, report sell in multiple currencies, and give us genuine visibility across the business. NetSuite, implemented the right way, and OneKloudX delivered exactly that.”

– Stuart Monger, CFO, Australian Farming Services

Structured methodology. Agricultural industry experience. A team willing to go beyond configuration and build what the business actually needed.

AFS selected OneKloudX for a combination of reasons: a structured implementation methodology, demonstrated agricultural industry experience, and a collaborative working style that suited a tight timeline and genuinely unique operational requirements.

What differentiated OneKloudX was a deliberate approach of prioritising configuration over unnecessary customisation, while still committing fully to the bespoke requirements that define almond farming, processing and marketing, seasonal workforce management, and the specific accounting logic required to allocate returns across farm entities equitably.

Even when mid-project team changes created handover challenges, OneKloudX adapted without disrupting the client, drawing on institutional knowledge to maintain delivery continuity.

Delivered in two phases. Completed before the first commercial harvest. Built to fit the way AFS actually works, not the other way around.

The Modules Delivered Were:

Integrations

Additional integrations were delivered with PeopleKey, Active Directory, and Aus bank feeds, making NetSuite a great support to the operations of the business.

Built for Almond Farming, Not Around It

Almond farming operates on commercial and financial processes that are far more complex than those supported by a standard ERP. AFS required NetSuite to support export documentation, logistics integration, sophisticated procurement controls, and complex approval structures well beyond out-of-the-box functionality.

OneKloudX designed and delivered a suite of bespoke customisations tailored specifically to how AFS operates, including sales and export documentation processes, deposit management controls, commercial invoicing and shipping documentation, quarantine declarations, consolidated shipment processing, and integration with ALMADS logistics platform to automate work order creation for the packing and dispatch of the product.

Delegation of Authority workflows allowed procurement approvals to be managed by subsidiary, employee, and purchasing category, supporting complex approval hierarchies and delivering stronger financial controls and significantly reduced administrative effort.

“Agriculture is one of the most demanding industries to implement ERP in. The requirements are highly specific, the operational systems are bespoke, and the business processes don’t map neatly to out-of-the-box configuration. With AFS, we leaned into that complexity and built something that fits the way they actually work.”

– Robert Jurcec, Group CEO & Sales Director, OneKloudX

The NetSuite implementation gave AFS the operational and financial infrastructure to transition confidently from almond grower to vertically integrated processor and global distributor, with the reporting capability, auditability, and integration depth required to satisfy institutional investors..

Operational Impact

Procurement workflows previously relying on physical approvals are now governed by automated delegation policies within NetSuite. Accounts payable, supported by ZoneCapture OCR, significantly reduced manual invoice handling. Payroll is now fully automated within NetSuite, with PeopleKey feeding time and attendance data directly into the system, reducing administrative burden and compliance exposure across a growing workforce.

Financial Visibility

For the first time, AFS’s finance team has real-time visibility into per-farm performance and processing performance. USD-denominated reports for the business’s US-based institutional investors can now be produced on demand via NetSuite OneWorld, a capability that did not previously exist.

An Ongoing Relationship

Following go-live, AFS has continued to engage OneKloudX as an ongoing NetSuite consulting partner, iterating on the system, resolving emerging requirements, and extending capabilities as the processing operation matures. The engagement has evolved from implementation delivery to long-term strategic advisory.

The AFS project wasn’t a standard ERP implementation. It required deep industry knowledge, genuine customisation capability, and a team that could deliver under pressure.

Agriculture presents implementation challenges that generic ERP projects rarely anticipate: seasonal workforce complexity, real-time operational system integration, and multi-entity structures serving both local operations and international investors. OneKloudX navigated all of it.

If your business is preparing for a period of operational growth or transformation and your current finance stack is not equipped to scale with you, we would welcome the conversation.