I had recently made a change to my FarmOS where I wanted to track expenses of things. I have created a unit for Dollars and just use a count type for the quantity. The actual change I made was adding an Expense category to my instance. I wanted to have a way to distinguish logs as having expenses so that I can track our expenses or expenses in connection with other quantities. I was quite pleased with the change and entering the first few logs for some expenses. Since I could use multiple categories I could add even more information if I choose to break down where in relation to areas of my farm i am spending money.
How are others tracking Expenses? Does anyone have anything different that’s working for them?
That’s great @applecreekacres! That will totally work as a way of tracking costs until we develop a more dedicated approach (there has been some thought to this, and it may actually be similar to how you’ve approached it).
Two thoughts:
I have created a unit for Dollars and just use a count type for the quantity.
I wonder if using “value” instead of “count” would make more sense as the measure? When I added “value” as an option, my thought was that it could be used for monetary value, but maybe that isn’t really clear with a general name like “value”.
You may also want to try out the Purchase logs for recording purchases (available in the Farm Ledger module, which is not enabled by default).
In the future, I’d like to link Purchase logs to asset inventory, so you can track direct expenditures and also see where those things are being used. So, for example, you might record the purchase of animal feed, which increments your feed asset, which is then decremented by logs that record when animals were fed from this inventory. With a little bit of reporting, we’d be able to get a pretty good breakdown of where the costs are going that way. Future ideas!
I have been using purchase logs but found it to be a bit limiting.
It would be helpful if the list of inputs for a certain time frame or planting would calculate a total of dollar spend or inputs used. At the moment I copy the lists to Excel and do the calculations there.
Ideally one would select a planting and see a total cost at the end.
Agreed - the “Purchase” and “Sale” logs were a simple first step, but I decided to leave it as a “beta” module for that very reason, so it’s not enabled by default. Some people have found them useful - depends on the use-case I think.
