Budgeting

One of the most crucial developments for our farm was the creation of a cash flow spreadsheet. After a couple years in I realized we make a huge proportion of our income in the last third of each year—which meant money coming in September-December needed to last until July the following year. Your business may be different, but it is still valuable to track cash flow and make projections. This helps a lot when we consider what to spend money on (or not) and when.

It helps me personally manage a lot of stress because I have a good understanding of where we stand financially. The more years you have data for, the better your predictions may be. This year we changed a lot—hello forming a Collective! Also Covid actually boosted sales for us. So it has been a bit of a wild card. But over the last several years I have been able to predict our cashflow pretty accurately. One update I have made this year is to match our quickbooks reports. Each time I update the spreadsheet, I just copy and paste from a profit and loss report (monthly report). I’m pretty sure a trained accountant would cringe at doing it this way, it excludes liabilities and owner draws and other things I am sure. I add loan payoffs and owner draws manually because this is what has been easiest for me so far. I will follow up with another blog post soon with how we have structured our quickbooks.

In the meantime here is a sample of our budget spreadsheet. I made predictions last winter, and have since updated them to reflect real numbers for the months that have passed. It would be interesting to see the difference between predictions and actual but I have not had the bandwidth to track that yet.

You can download our full spreadsheet HERE.

This has many of the details of our farm financials—which feels like personal information. However, we believe it can be empowering to share numbers with each other. Please be respectful. I’d love to hear any other ideas for farm cashflow tracking y’all have.

In solidarity,

Jill and the GTFC crew