If you've explored Farmbrite's Accounting features in the past, you are probably aware that you can associate transactions with animals, fields, crop types, or equipment records. This connects the income or expense with a specific record, while still including it in your overall account-wide Profit and Loss Statements and other reports and dashboards. The concept is that you'll still have your main reports for your business totals, but be able to see more granular expenses on individual records to see what is producing profit and what other items might be more expensive than necessary. To streamline this, you can also add the transactions in bulk to these records, or associate the transaction with a livestock group overall.
Quick Summary
- Smart and Basic livestock groups show an accounting tab that calculates income, expenses, and a profit/loss for the group.
- You can associate a transaction with the group that stays with it permanently regardless of the current active members.
- Transactions associated with individual animals will be included in the accounting tab calculations for current group members.
- If an animal is no longer part of the group, their individual transactions will no longer be included in the group accounting.
Adding Group Transactions
To associate a transaction with the group, navigate to Livestock>Livestock Groups and select the group you'd like to work with. Access their accounting tab, and you'll see a button to Record Transaction.
Adding the transaction here will associate it the group overall. This utilizes a split transaction to allocate a portion of the overall cost to each animal in the group. This can split the entire amount amongst the current group members (Total for Group), or add the amount to each member individually (Per Record). Regardless of which option you choose the transaction is linked to both the group overall, and the individual animals.
- When splitting as Total for Group, the amount will be divided by the number of current group members. As an example, since there are 12 Buffalo in the group, so our $120 transaction is split as $10 each. The $120 is the total amount, with $10 allocated to each individual animal.
- When splitting as Per Record, the amount will be multiplied per animal for the total. As another example, since there are 12 buffalo in the example group, if we recorded the amount as $120, each animal would be assigned that amount, for a total transaction of $1440.
Both options still present the same selections for date, payee/customer, category, keywords, attachments, etc.
Note that the Associated To field shows the group name, indicating this transaction is connected to the group overall, as well as the individual animals within the group in the split transactions. This means that the group transaction will always display on the group accounting tab, regardless of the changes in group membership/active animals in the group. Even if one of these buffalo is sold or butchered in the future, or just ages out of the group, the cost/income is still associated with the group overall. It also still reflects on the individual animal's accounting regardless of whether they are still in the group.
Adding Transactions In Bulk
Alternatively, you could add the transaction to each animal in bulk instead of associating it with the group. This means that the transactions will always be reflected on the individual animal record accounting, but will only be included with the group accounting if the animal is currently part of the group. It will not be included in the group accounting if the animal is not longer part of it.
To add individual transactions to selected group members, just check their boxes on the main animals page in the group, and then choose Bulk Actions and Record Transaction. This can also be done from your main Livestock Dashboard (outside of the group) to bulk add transactions for animals outside of the group too.
The Group Accounting Tab and P&L - What You Should Know
It's worth taking a final look at the Accounting Tab on a group so you know exactly what transactions will be included in the totals.
- Any transaction associated to the group will always be shown on this tab. Even if it was split amongst members who were no longer in the group, the group association connects that amount to the group accounting. The $1440 for transportation services in our example above is assigned to the group and will always be there (unless deleted/unassociated, of course).
- Any transactions associated with current group members will also be displayed and count towards the group totals. This also includes any other transaction associated with them, even if they were applied from outside the group or before the animal was part of the group. The $25 each for the bulk transactions above will reflect in the group tab, and if one of those animals is removed from the group, the transactions that are associated with them individually will also be removed.
- Transactions applied in bulk to individual animals will always be shown on the individual animal's accounting tab, and will be counted in the group accounting for any group the animal is currently part of. This creates a total for the group out of the group transactions and individual animal transactions to arrive at the correct overall profit or loss for the group.
Reach out to us with any questions on applying these transactions!