FarmRaise Tracks

We have begun using FarmRaise tracks for managing our farm. In our prior business ventures, we used Quickbooks and Quicken. These are great programs and have their place. Unfortunately, their place is not on a farm. Schedule F does not populate properly in Quicken. There is not the ability to manage livestock or farmland. FarmRaise offers a great solution to manage the business end of the farm with ease.

Inventory, products, expenses, assets, and liabilties are all extremely intuitive to set up initially and to use day to day. This is the first program I have used that makes mileage tracking easy in real time. With the phone app, we can add mileage and purpose when we arrive at the destination. Everything is labelled according to Schedule F if applicable. The tutorial videos they have on youtube are excellent!

FarmRaise has been a game changer. We are still learning the system but so far it is more helpful than the other accounting software we have tried. At this time, the only thing we need to figure out is field locations. When you watch Farmraise youtube videos, they show how to move your four cows from one field to another. That is simple. What is not clearly explained is how to create your field locations to begin with. What I was hoping would be the case is a tab to add locations to your farm. The best I have figured out to date is that you need to create locations for each type of animal in your inventory. This would probably make sense for larger farms. We are not a large farm. We are ultimately a micro farm with only 3.5 acres, four paddocks, three poultry enclosures, and one mix-use pen that currently holds our two boars. Still not a problem...let me add a detail. We mix our animals together.

Sheep, Pigs, and a goat all use the same fields. For example, we currently have five piglets, our ram, and a goat in our front field. We have the three kune pigs in our lower field with three lambs. We created the field locations for our pigs and assigned the correct animals to the fields. We then went into our sheep inventory and the locations that I had previously created are not visible. This does not allow for a complete picture of our field rotations. We would really benefit from having the locations as s separate entity in the Tracks.

Update

I began writing this post in August of 2024. I had stopped writing to get in touch with the team at FarmRaise and see what they had to say. It is now November of 2024 and I happened to find this in draft form. At some point between then and now, I did chat with a FarmRaise associate. That nice lady stated that this is a known impediment and their developers are working on it. At this point, it is mute for us at Farm Life Farm. We had to add the fields to each animal in our inventory. I don't like duplicating efforts, and I really loath sitting in front of a computer. Still, over the past few months, we had to rotate our livestock and therefore had to create locations.

We have the following animals in our inventory right now:

5 Kunekune piglets (6 months old)

2 Kunekune pigs (12 months old)

1 Kune sow

1 Yorkshire Boar

4 Ewes

3 Lambs

1 Ram

10 Laying ducks

8 Meat ducks

15 Laying hens

10 Meat chickens

6 Chicks

The above list is how we classify our livestock in FarmRaise Tracks. The reason for this is based on how we track our expenses and sales. Putting all the ducks in the same group would conflict when parsing out revenues and expenses. We do not want to assess grain costs for our egg layers that our meat birds ate. When it comes time to sell a meat bird, the costs of raising it has to guide the selling price. At the same time, we need to know if the cost of raising and keeping the egg layers so we can see if our selling price of $4.00/dz for chicken and $6.00/dz for Duck eggs is tuning a profit, breaking even, or running a loss.

The same thing applies to livestock. Fencing costs, grain, hay, etc all must be tracked to know what profit or loss you are running. All of this led to how we broke down our livestock for proper tracking of expense and income. As much as I dislike computers, it is really neat to run a profit loss statement and see that your pig sales are up this year and actually made a profit.

Our farm has three grazing fields.

• Top Field

• Front Field

• Lower Field

One mix use pen currently holding two boars

• Boar Pen

And three poultry pens.

• Laying birds

• Meat Birds

• Brooder Pen

As Mentioned above, being able to create these 7 locations would be the most efficient. In our case, we had to create the four paddocks that ewes can live in, four that the lambs can be in, and four for the ram. Then we had to do it again...Five paddocks for yearling Kunes, and five paddocks for the older Kunes. That is 22 locations we had to create for a 4 acre farm with 17 animals. Keep in mind that the above math is not for all our animals, meaning in the end we created more than 22 locations

This was not as bad as I make it sound. We ultimately created the locations as we rotated animals to different fields. It worked out to just a few extra minutes of typing every few weeks. This really isn't such an inconvenience. Unfortunately I am a libra and nothing is ever quite good enough. This is my only critique which I must admit is an amazing achievement for this sort of software.

Adding mileage is also a 20 second task. Over twenty years of some sort of business, I never tracked my mileage. Farmraise Tracks has made this pain free. Seeing our mileage add up over the past 11 months has made it clear what a mistake I had made over the past two decades not tracking mileage. At one point in our twenties, we were travelling the country with a show jumper barn she worked for. I was following along working as a logistics coordinator and equipment operator for the Horse Shows her barn was showing at. I had called a car insurance company for a quote and when asked my yearly driving I told the truth; 24,000 miles a year. the sales rep laughed and would not believe me or knew that the cost would have been astronomical based on that much driving. Not a single mile had been documented and therefore the deductions at tax time were not realized. Fun fact: 24,000 miles at an average speed of 50mph works out to 20 days of driving or 480 hours a year I sat behind the wheel. I loved it. I still love driving. And it was me. My darling beloved can drive for a few hours and then she falls asleep.

Tracks also creates a very professional invoice with little effort. At the onset of use, you can upload your logo and business information. The program does the rest. All you have to do once your info is in is tap the invoicing tab and put in the customer, what you sold, and the program creates an invoice that you can print or email. It also allows you to classify the sale according to your schedule F. In quicken and quickbooks, the tax classification had to be done seperately after the invoice was created. I had created invoices with quicken and quickbooks in the past. Those programs are labor intensive. You have to build the invoice form from a template, adding text boxes and choosing columns. Going back in to change

anything you created wrong is also a chore. Tracks has this simplified.

(screenshot of the Transaction screen)

Few of our customers want invoices however and in those situations the process is just as easy. Click on add revenue and enter the customer name, amount of money, and the date. That is all you have to enter. You then have the option of classifying the revenue by tax category and product. You can also split an expense or revenue. Ex: I sold a dozen eggs and a pig. We can split the total revenue of $900. $4.00 for eggs and $896 for the pig. You are also able to classify each separately when you do the split. This has been invaluable when going to the grain store. One receipt for $250.00 that you can split for each item purchased and assign the, lets say $28 in pig food to the pigs and the $30 worth of chicken grain to the chickens. You can also take a picture of the receipt and save it to the expense. I tend to sit in the parking lot after buying and enter it all into my phone app. Again, an amazing program for a farmer!

Above I had mentioned a profit loss statement. This is one place that this program excels. Adding revenue and expenses is easy and intuitive as described above. This all culminates with three or four key strokes to create reports. All your

effort is worthwhile when your wife asks if her wooden signs are worth making. Pull up a report for your expenses and sales associated with your sign making and your answer is clear...charge ten dollars more per sign and it is worth it.

One other function that we do not use is banking connectivity. Tracks allows you to link your farming bank accounts and download your transactions just like Quicken and Quickbooks. I cannot critique this as we don't use it.

I must admit, we did not demo other software for farm management. We did do a bunch of research and did not find anything to compare to FarmRaise Tracks. There are other programs out there but those we looked at were clearly for corporate level agribusiness with a price tag to match. FarmRaise offers virtually everything a small family farm needs. It certainly offers everything we need. Though I remain soar over the location topic, I cannot find any other failures of this software.