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 into Ambrook, allowing you to look at profit per acre, per head, or any other unit that makes sense for your operation.
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.
Why use metrics?
Automatically apply splits
Creating metrics on your smart tags 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 a preset proportion or formula, 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, 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 sub-dashboard in Analytics. Metrics can be found in the "Metrics" column for tag settings, the "Metrics" section in a 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.