Field exercise: build the financial dashboard of your last year, in units

This lesson is part of Farm manager: finance, growth, succession specialisation. It opens to every registered student, from free registration. Levels 1 to 5 and the tracks remain readable by everyone.

Eight lessons gave the tools; this exercise applies them to the only farm that matters, yours. In half a day, with your documents of the last twelve months, you will build on one sheet the financial dashboard of your last year: the profit and loss account in units, the five ratios, the full cost per kilo, the reserve in days of feed, the break-even point and the share of your first customer, each next to the benchmark of the three-house farm. By the end, you will know where your farm is strong, where it is fragile, and in what order to act. No amount appears on the sheet: your figures go in as units, and that is what allows them to be compared and shown without revealing anything.

• ✓Gather the documents of one year and draw from them the quantities, then the money units, with the feed stock correction
• ✓Fill in the financial dashboard sheet: sixteen lines, your figure next to the School's benchmark
• ✓Read each gap and link it to a technical, commercial or management cause
• ✓Rank three priority actions for the coming year, with their expected effect in units

1. Purpose, materials and organisation of the half-day
2. Step 1: the quantities of the year
3. Step 2: moving to money, in units
4. Step 3: the financial dashboard sheet
5. Step 4: reading the sheet and deciding three actions
6. Going further

• •Materials: twelve document files, purchases and sales ledger, flock registers, cash book and statements, inventory of assets, instalment table; two people, half a day.
• •Step 1 quantities (flocks, received, sold, kilos, feed corrected for stock, FCR, clean-out); step 2 units (item ÷ sales × 100, sales = 100); step 3 the sixteen-line sheet; step 4 reading and three actions.
• •Stock correction: 50 more bags at year end make the FCR look worse by 0.06 point; depreciation from the inventory even without payment; loan principal outside the costs.
• •Example two-house farm: feed 66, profit 3, full cost 97 hundredths, threshold 9.3 flocks out of 12, reserve 22 days, first customer 60%; three actions: FCR (density 5 per m² in heat, bonus), two buyers under contract, fixed remuneration and reserve share.
• •Expected effect in one year: profit 3 → 6.3 units, reserve 22 → 40 days; no third house this year; the sheet is redone every year and reread every quarter.