Thinking in dollars is useful when it comes to tax time or managing cashflow, but when you’re making operational decisions, it’s useful to put these dollars into the language that you use to run your business. Metrics allow you to translate dollars to operational quantities directly in Ambrook, allowing you to look at profit per acre, per head, or any other unit that makes sense for your operation.
Follow along with Paige to learn to use metrics to better understand your business.
What is a metric?
Metrics are units you can store on tags in Ambrook to help you automatically allocate transactions or to understand your profitability on a per-unit basis.
Some example use cases include:
Enterprises: see your cost per bushel (for corn) or revenue per head (for livestock)
Locations: see profit per acre (for fields) or cost per square foot (for facilities)
Metrics are static, but you can update the values over time as your business evolves.
How should I set up my enterprises to get my breakeven cost?
In many cases, you might incur the costs in one year, but sell product in the next. Examples might include livestock that’s raised in one year and sold in another, or grain that’s grown in one year and sold into the next. In all these cases, you can set up your enterprises by crop year to be able to get a per-unit profitability in each year, while still having your in-year costs for tax purposes. A few examples might include:
Corn and soybeans: set up your enterprises to include a sub-enterprise for each crop year. This would include:
Corn (your parent enterprise - create this one first)
Corn 2024 (planted in 2024, sold in 2025)
Corn 2025 (planted in 2025, sold in 2026)
Note that after each season, you can “archive” the enterprise to keep your tagger clean - archiving removes it from the list of options, but will retain historical tags when you’d like to look at your reports.
Cow/Calf: set up enterprises to include the year for each calf crop. For example:
2024 Calves
2023 Replacement Heifers
Note that you can also separate this into profit centers (enterprises where you sell your calves) and cost centers (which includes the cost of producing those calves). You won’t always know which channel you’re selling through until the end of the year, so you can use our internal transfer feature to move the cost to the correct profit enterprise to get a profit number for each sales channel / method.
If you have any questions about your specific set up, don’t hesitate to reach out to our support team to help point you in the right direction.
Why use metrics?
Automatically apply splits
Creating metrics can speed up tag splitting and lead to more accurate income or expense allocations across multiple enterprises, locations, projects, or funding programs. For tag allocations that you find yourself splitting in your head by acre, head, or on any other basis, try storing metrics and making that calculation automatic.
When tagging, click the split icon to view available metrics for splitting. You’ll see the tags that have been assigned that metric and the values on each of those tags. As you select tags, the percentage splits will automatically update according to the metrics you’ve stored.
You can set defaults when creating metrics to further speed things up. Tags with a default metric will automatically activate the split by that unit when it's the first tag selected from the list.
See your profit or cost per unit
Metrics can be used as divisors for values in the Analytics tab. When you click on a specific Location, Enterprise, Project or Funding tag, you’ll see the option to Slice by metric based on the values you’ve created for that tag. This will show you your unit economics without using mental math or a spreadsheet to do the calculation for you.
Creating metrics
You can create metrics on any tag type by going to Settings and selecting either Enterprises, Locations, Projects, or Funding.
To create a Metric:
Open a tag by clicking the pencil button, or create a new tag from the Add button.
Click New Metric to open up the metric editor.
Add a metric, or select an existing metric that you’ve created on another tag. Using an existing metric will allow you to split transactions by that metric while tagging.
Select the corresponding unit.
Set the quantity. This is the number of that unit assigned to this particular tag, like the number of acres at that specific location. You can edit these at any time.
Press “Save” to finish.
Continue creating metrics on all applicable tags to get the most out of tag splitting.
Editing and viewing metrics
Some metrics may change frequently, such as Yield or Mileage , while other types may be static or infrequently change, such as Acreage. You can edit a metric's quantity at any time to reflect its current amount.
Find the tag you're interested in from the Settings menu or a dashboard in Analytics. Metrics can be found in the "Metrics" column in tag settings, the "Metrics" section in an Analytics dashboard's info sidebar, or from any tag's detail panel.
Click on the metric's quantity or find "Edit" in the three-dot menu.
Edit the "Quantity" field to an up-to-date amount and press "Save."
You can see all your metrics together from any tag settings table.
FAQ
What if my metric changes quantity?
What if my metric changes quantity?
Metrics are flexible for different use cases. For example, you can track Yield as an estimate throughout the year to project breakeven prices, then plug in your actuals when the data is available. Currently, a metric can only have a single quantity at a time and previous quantities are not stored.
Do I have to select a unit?
Do I have to select a unit?
No, a metric type can be unit-less, but it may make your reporting more clear if you do select a unit.
Does editing a metric affect tag allocations that were split using previous quantities?
Does editing a metric affect tag allocations that were split using previous quantities?
After editing a metric, the new quantity will be reflected in the tagger and analytics dashboards. Previous splits will not be affected. You can always find these and re-split with your new metrics to update them.