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A new phone app allows shearing contractors to save time by uploading photos of their tally books, which it uses to create invoices and pay runs in Xero.
ShearOps was designed by Anton Musalov, Luke Hillis and Ronan Avery from Gore.
Musalov told Farmer’s Weekly he grew up working on mate Luke Hillis’s farm and shearing with him and his family’s Hillis Shearing gangs.
When Musalov went to study engineering, Hillis was off to Australia for shearing and eventually started his own shearing gang.
Musalov said Hillis had challenges with payroll and invoicing, and did not like the outdated options available, saying they were time consuming and expensive.
These options were also tied to a single computer.
“Each week shearing contractors have to send in a bunch of tally books, manually enter numbers into Xero, and then manually create invoices.”
This took Hillis an entire day each week to do.
From left, ShearOps founders Luke Hillis, Ronan Avery and Anton Musalov.
Hillis asked Musalov to build something more efficient.
With ShearOps you can take a photo of a tally book, or upload a photo, and the system reads the tally book, checks the calculations, pulls all the work types, and matches it to employees.
The software gives a full breakdown of work completed, and automatically creates invoices as soon as the job is logged.
It is also tied to Xero, which most shearing gangs use, and can be used offline, with the app connecting to Xero to update documents as soon as there is a connection available.
Besides invoicing, the app has more add-ons.
Shearers can log health, safety and animal welfare issues and store related documents.
Gang operators also get in-depth data on employees and clients.
On top of that the app allows contractors to book shearing courses.
Most importantly of all, in collaboration with FarmStrong, it will send shearers wellbeing tips as they start work.
ShearOps users can take a photo of their tally book and the ShearOps app takes it straight to Xero.
Shane Ratima, president of the Shearing Association and owner of Ratima Shearing Limited, said he has been helping Musalov develop ShearOps.
He said the software that many shearing contractors use ties you to a single computer and is all based on manual entry. This limits him to where he can use it.
Now, “anyone could be doing your payroll from all around the planet”.
“It’s the way of the future. The biggest thing for contractors is just getting our time back, that’s worth quite a lot.”
ShearOps is currently working with four contractors, and has interest from Australia.