The Round Number

Read the reply for what it asks of you rather than what it says to the family, because the two are different. To the family it says: two seasons, two meetings, two budgets. To the accountant who sent the plan it says something more precise — that the plan arrived without the numbers a lender needs to write two loans, and that the one number it did carry, NZ$2.0m, was the kind a lender recognises at once. Nobody's calving cash curve comes to a round two million. The bank was not being difficult. It was telling you which page was missing.

That is why A, the family's instinct and the patriarch's wish, is the wrong first move for you in particular. Thirty years and spotless conduct belong to the entity that is about to stop existing; the two entities the bank is being asked to lend to have no seasons at all. Pushing back on their behalf before their budgets exist asks the bank to lend on sentiment, and it spends your own credibility — the thing that made the bank reply inside a week — on an argument you would lose at any bank that reads. C makes the same mistake with a longer drive: another bank will ask for the same two budgets, and will start from no history instead of thirty years of it.

D is the honest half of a right answer at the wrong moment. You will, before long, have to say that one family has become three clients whose interests can diverge: the daughter's lease to the trust is the son's cost, the guarantee that frees the father binds the children, and the sharemilking agreement the daughter did not choose sits between all of them. That conversation is yours to have, and soon. But stepping back now, with the deadline at calving and the bank's questions unanswered, leaves three people without the one adviser who knows the numbers.

The senior read is B. Before any reply, build what the bank has asked for and what should have gone on Tuesday: the son's month-by-month cash through calving, so the seasonal line has a shape and not a number; the daughter's standalone budget, where her margin lives between a lease, a sharemilker and a payout she sets none of; and each entity at NZ$6.50, where you will find what the bank already knows from your own accounts — that the combined business breaks even a little over NZ$6.20 before the family's drawings and nearer NZ$7.30 after them. Then answer the drawings line yourself, before anyone asks, because it was in the accounts you signed. If the plan is as sound as it is tidy, the numbers will say so and the meetings will go well. If one leg of it cannot carry its own weight, the family should hear it from you, now, at a cycle high.

The bank replied through you because the plan came through you. Send it the pages that were missing, and then tell the family what three clients means.