Farmers Improve Recordkeeping and Accounting Skills

In August 2018, Melanie and I attended USDA SCORE Resource Fair and built relationships with SCORE volunteers. Following this event, the South Central NY Dairy and Field Crops Team partnered with the SCORE Syracuse chapter to collaboratively organize and implement a 4-week class on recordkeeping with QuickBooks software in January 2019.

The course was completely full, as sixteen students from thirteen farms participated in the workshop, located at the Cortland County Chamber of Commerce. The participants included 7 dairy operations, 3 livestock producers, 2 crop farms, and one seed farm. These thirteen farms represented Broome, Cortland, Otsego, Tioga, and Tompkins counties.

SCORE volunteer Lynn Stearns was the lead instructor for the class, and three other SCORE volunteers attended various sessions to provide additional student support. The course began with an overview of basic accounting principles, before diving into setting up a company and recording business transactions in QuickBooks. SCORE provided laptops with QuickBooks software for students to use during the course, keeping the class interactive and engaging.

Lynn used a QuickBooks file representing a sample farm to demonstrate various features of the accounting software. Students appreciated the ways that Lynn adapted the standard course content to make the class especially relevant to agricultural businesses. In particular, students liked the demonstration on how to enter various components of a milk check.

In the third week of the course, I gave a presentation on Record Keeping for Risk Management, fulfilling an objective for the New York Crop Insurance and Risk Management Education Project. The risk management discussion dovetailed nicely with the broader accounting and recordkeeping themes. Students who completed the training can submit receipts for up to $100 reimbursement of the purchase of QuickBooks software, funded by the USDA Risk Management Agency.

Upon completion of the course we received 10 evaluation surveys from the 16 participants, indicating that the training met student expectations. Prior to taking the course, 40% of participants had never used QuickBooks in their farm business. After completing the course, 100% of students said that they plan to use QuickBooks to track financial records on the farm in 2019. Individual students reported several additional actions that they plan to take following the course, including:

  • Purchase and start using a new payroll program
  • Separate personal checking and farm checking accounts
  • Improve the Chart of Accounts to better categorize revenue and expense transactions
  • Start using new functions within QuickBooks to keep more detailed records
  • Stay up to date and keep better records
  • Supply better records to my tax accountant

Students gave excellent ratings to instructor knowledge, class handouts, and the venue. Notably, all students enrolled in the course reported finding out about it from one of several different CCE publicity efforts, including Facebook, CCE email, CCE website, the Dairy Digest newsletter, Country Folks, and word of mouth. This finding highlights the importance of the South Central NY Dairy and Field Crops team’s marketing and publicity efforts to the success of this ongoing partnership with SCORE.