Most US-based farming and ranching operations use cash accounting, and the majority prepare market-value balance sheets for purposes such as borrowing operating capital. A big hurdle these agricultural businesses face in using QuickBooks, is how to get inventories of things the farm or ranch produces into QuickBooks—and assign estimated market values to them—in a way that is compatible with cash accounting.
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About Part 2
Part II will explore some of the management information you can have "for free" simply by using Inventory Part Items to keep track of farm production inventories and sales in QuickBooks.
Acknowledgements
This article is mostly excerpted from Chapters 2 and 5 of The QuickBooks Farm Accounting Cookbook™, Volume II: Raised Farm Production Inventories, Sales, and More...,, by Mark Wilsdorf.
About the Author
Mark Wilsdorf has worked with QuickBooks users in agriculture since the 1980s. He was editor of AgriComp, the first national magazine for agricultural computing, has authored books about using QuickBooks in agriculture (The QuickBooks Farm Accounting Cookbook™ series), has done consulting work for Fortune-500 businesses serving agriculture, and has been the lead developer on several software projects for developing QuickBooks add-ons. He currently writes an agriculture-oriented QuickBooks blog at QBAgCenter.com.
For proof that Mark always has at least one foot in agriculture, you might look around his office at home....there you would find things like a folder of soil test reports, calf obstetrical supplies, a seed sample waiting on a germination test, a stack of machinery parts catalogs...and a lariat that he will never learn to use really well.