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Hey Thanks Steve!
Now for the next question! I am currently working on Hauling purchased manure to a stockpile in one of my fields, but I dont know at this point exactly which field it will be applied to or at what rate it will end up being. I want to enter the project into the system so that the expense is included, but i have not found a way to enter an inventory expense and the equipment cost associated with it. Ideally it would be nice to enter it as an inventory expense operation for the current year then when it gets applied to a field at a latter date it can then be applied from the storage inventory and all the expense can then be applied to the field as $/volume/acre in the Manure operation input window and associated with the proper field and crop year of choice along with the equipment cost associated to the application operation at that time. Any manure remaining can then be carried over to another year or another field and the cost per volume that goes with it. Instead of needing to enter the operation to a specific field or all fields as an Other Operation and ending up having to go back and edit the stockpile operation to match up with the field the manure was applied to and creating a proper cost/volume/acre breakdown.
Hopefully you can follow what i have tried to say here and Thanks in advance for your time. I may be missing some form of input method so I look forward to your response!
Hi Philip, I was definitely able to follow what you wrote, a very well thought out question. Right now there is no facility in the software to track input inventory, the only inventory we track is the commodity grown for sale and the only reason we track that is to help match up sales to crop year. I'm going to forward your entire comment to our development team. We've historically tracked all expenses related to inputs with the application of the input, but that doesn't address your needs at all in this situation. I thought originally that I would tell you to just enter the costs associated with the stockpile (labour, machinery) as either an other operation like you mentioned above, or as an Other Expense. With a little bit of additional thought Other Expense just becomes too cumbersome to work with in this situation so we are left with that pesky Other Operation. The only way for you to record this at present is, as you surmised, an Other Operation. You can record any equipment and labour costs on the General tab, leaving the Other tab blank except for whatever notes you wished to record (like stockpile manure for tbd application), it would be important to attach the operation to every single one of your fields so that once it was all said and done, you could just then edit each recorded other operation to modify the acres if necessary. If I were in your shoes, I'd probably just make some paper notes at this time regarding the costs of creating the stockpile and how much fertilizer is in the stockpile. Once all of my manure operations have been entered, I'd then enter that other operation as one operation to multiple fields, just editing the acres as appropriate. That way you don't have to go back and edit anything.
Another option would be to include the cost of creating the stockpile in your input cost (Manure setup). Let's say it cost me $1/tonne to buy 100 tonnes of fertilizer ($100) and I determined that the cost of creating the stockpile was an additional $100 in labour, and machinery expense), I could set up the manure at a cost of $2/tonne that way as I apply it the costs are already rolled in. The only down side to doing it this way is that you wouldn't be able to track machinery or labour expense "specifically" like you can with an "Other Operation."
I hope that gives you some ideas. I agree with you that this certainly isn't an easy way and your idea above is definitely interesting. I'll send it all on to the big brains to see what they can come up with. Who knows, this may be one of those next great features we're always looking for!
Thanks Philip!