Spring is Here!

Now is a great time to do a little spring cleaning of your financial records. You are likely either going through the data for your 2016 tax return, or have recently completed it, so all of the information should be fresh in your mind. What a perfect time to review those things that took a little longer to figure out and fine-tune your system to make it easier for next year. For example:

• Maybe it’s a change to your chart of accounts where you have similar accounts and you now realize they could be combined into one account.

o   Did you know there is a function in most accounting software that will combine one or more accounts and all of the history?

• Maybe it’s providing more detail to your accountant, loan officer or other third party by breaking out certain accounts such as:

o   Raised vs. purchased livestock

o   Family living and personal allocations

o   Allocate principal and interest

• Maybe it’s a matter of the way you enter your data.

o   Enter quantities such as lbs., number of head

o   Detail in capital assets changes

o   Coop patronage retained

In any event, we at Yankee Farm Credit are here to help with the knowledge and experience to make those records squeaky clean!

We'd love to help with your Spring Cleaning, click here so we can get started.

Annual Meeting Results

It has been a busy week here at Yankee as we held annual meetings Monday in Middlebury, VT; Tuesday in both Hanover, NH and Newport, VT; and wrapping up last night in St. Albans, VT. At each meeting members had the opportunity to listen to director candidates, vote for directors in their region, hear from Brenda Frank, CEO and Paul Franklin, Board Chair about the state of the Association, and observe a presentation on survey results about transferring farm ownership conducted by Business Consultant Joanna Lidback.

Last night members completed voting for directors, ballots were counted, and the results were announced before the meeting was adjourned.
Elected to three year terms on the board of directors were:
Region 1 – Celeste Kane-Stebbins
Region 2 – Kyle Thygesen
Region 3 – Paul Franklin
Congratulations to Celeste, Kyle and Paul, and thanks to Anne Lincoln and Joseph O'Gorman for participating in the elections as candidates.

Thank you to the members that participated, and a special thanks to employees for organizing and running successful meetings. We welcome any feedback about annual meetings. If you have questions or comments please let us know! You can email your thoughts or give our Corporate Secretary, Jim Mills, a call at 800-639-3053.

FINANCIAL RECORDS PAINT THE PICTURE

We recently shared the #1 reason for having an 
accounting software program –

“For viewing information that allows you to make informed management decisions.”

In addition, there are times it may be necessary to provide financial information about your farm to third parties such as loan officers, consultants and others. Accounting software gives you the ability to track information about your farm, making it easy to provide third parties the detailed information they require. Whether it is for your management team, loan officer, tax preparer or workman's comp auditor, with a good agriculturally oriented accounting software system in place, financial management should be the easiest part of running your business.

If you are interested in discovering how your accounting software can help you manage your business, need help setting up your accounting system or are thinking maybe now is a good time to hire an outside professional to process the financial accounting data for you, we want to hear from you. Comment below or send your questions to our team at Yankee Farm Credit.