Enterprises are a unique and powerful tool in Ambrook to be able to understand the profitability of segments of a business. We make it easier to:

Below is a video walk through of a sample enterprise setup for a diversified vegetable operation that produces a handful of products.

A summary of these tags, and the types of questions they are most useful for answering specific questions about your business, is found below.

These tags allow you to associate revenues and expenses with a particular line of business so you can zoom in and compare your cost and profit centers without being distracted by overhead costs. For most farms and ranches, their Enterprises are the products they raise, but some farms have additional forms of income like ‘Agritourism’ or ‘Contract Production’. You can think about your Enterprises as anything you have both income and expenses for. The exception is an “Overheads” category that we generally recommend for any expenses that apply across all Enterprises. Another way to think about the Overheads enterprise is that it represents any expenses you would incur even if you decided to stop doing any one of your business lines.

Enterprises can also be nested for even more granular analysis.

Enterprises can simplify your chart of accounts by allowing you to track the expense as a Category and track the Enterprise as an additional piece of information about that expense. For example, you might be interested in tracking “Feed” as an expense, but want to know how much you spent on feed for your pigs and your goats separately. Instead of creating two Feed categories (‘Feed - Pigs’ and ‘Feed - Goats’), you can use the Enterprise tag to separate out Pigs and Goats. This makes it easy to compare expense categories across different enterprises when analyzing your costs.

Funding tags let you associate transactions to a particular funding source for easy review and reporting. A common example where a Funding tag can help is a reimbursement-based Cost Share or Grant like NRCS EQIP. Simply apply this tag to every transaction related to the funding source and reporting becomes a breeze.

Choosing what Funding tags to create when you start on Ambrook is easy; create a tag for each source of funding you currently use that might require some sort of transaction report on a periodic basis. You can customize these tags to match the level of granularity you need for reporting. For example, for a VAPG grant, you may want to separately track Processing Costs from Labor. Simply create additional tags for each Task type and tag transactions accordingly.

Even without a grant, you can use Funding tags to track the costs associated with a particular project. If you’re putting in buffer strips on your farm and want to know the total project cost, tag any expenses with the same funding tag to see your total costs at the end of the project.