Using Enterprises
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:
Split transactions into line items to be tagged with separate categories and enterprises
Split transactions by percentages to allocate expenses to the right category and enterprise.
Move value between enterprises, even when no money changes hands. Internal transfers are particularly useful for vertically integrated operations where a business is doing the producing, processing, and selling under the same business umbrella.
Export enterprise-level P&Ls to consistently review your business lines.
Below is a video explaining categories and enterprises in Ambrook.
A summary of these tags, and the types of questions they are most useful for answering specific questions about your business, is found below.
Enterprise Tags
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.
Examples
Feeder Cattle
Wheat
Vegetables
Leafy Greens
Squash
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.