Enterprise Record Keeping

Once you have chosen a record system you will first need to record the data accurately before any analysis can take place. So how should you capture the data? There are numerous ways and there is a number of accounting programs written for computer systems you might want to investigate but for this lesson we will explore a simple solution for a farmer who has a number of operations running simultaneously on his farm: Enterprise Record Keeping.

Study Table 2: Example of the Enterprise Record Keeping System

The enterprise columns allow you to split income and expenditure across different farming activities. In the example above these activities include rearing cattle and growing maize. The advantage of this approach is that besides tracking cash flow you can also see how profitable various activities are in relation to each other.