Quickbooks...

One of the hardest and least expected parts of running a farm is becoming an accountant for your business.

I was hesitant to use quickbooks for a long time, but you should just do it. Quickbooks online is a great tool and it is getting better all the time. It has powerful reporting data and gives you professional tools to manage your invoicing and a way to simply share data with your accountant during tax time. (I also recommend hiring an accountant to do your taxes). It is worth it, I promise.

I had aspirations of doing a lot of crop record keeping in quickbooks but have decided to keep it simple. (Our harvest log now gives us better reporting)

Here are the Income Accounts we use now, and I think they are here to stay.

You can create these when you create an item in an invoice. You may also manage them in your chart of accounts.

Almost all of quickbooks has an Add New item at the very top no matter what you are working with…items in invoices, categories, income accounts…just scroll to the top. Be mindful of how you create items and try to do it the same each time.

Here is adding a new account and nesting it within another parent account. We have been using Sales as our parent account and then having a sub account for our major sales outlets. This is great because at a glance in a report we can see where money flows from.

Going back through your Chart of Accounts, especially when you are first setting things up is an important step that you should really do to make sure everything makes sense.

Again, I am not an accountant, but this system works for our farm, and I hope it helps you too. Let me know if you have questions, I am happy to tell you what I can.

Jill and the GTFC Crew