Ambrook offers flexibility to tag transactions beyond what you need for taxes. After you've categorized your income and expenses and set up your balance sheet, additional tags in Ambrook allow you to collect information about each transaction to support understanding your business.

Categories are the foundational layer that supports tax reporting. What sets Ambrook apart from other accounting software is that we let you add a few more dimensions to your chart of accounts to track more things you might care about at the same time you do your normal bookkeeping for tax purposes. Enterprises separate transactions for business units you want to track and analyze separately. You can think of Enterprises as peers to Categories; they’re another dimension you can use to understand your business.

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.

Like categories, Enterprises can 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.