A problem I run into this time of year is I start generating farming expense receipts at a more rapid pace. I end up throwing them into a pile to organize for accounting purposes later (i.e., shoe box accounting). This usually results in a long accounting process when I do my year end income tax and sales tax returns where you are trying to remember what certain receipts were for, you can't figure out the date of the receipt because different vendors format dates differently, some receipts might go missing based on banking records, some receipts fade, etc. Recording every expense within a few days of making them would solve alot of these problems and might even make ongoing and year-end accounting process relatively painless.

What I decided to do was start an expense journal for myself for the farm starting in May 2022. To get started I simply started entering my May 2022 expenses into a text file. I called the file "Farm-Expense-Journal.txt" because I'm just recording expenses by date.

The text file editor I use, UltraEdit, has a great column editing mode that allows me to easily select a column area containing a column of numbers and use a "Sum column/selections" feature get their sum. I take care to line up each column of numbers or letters in straight vertical lines so I can get sums easily and so it looks neat and organized. If you confine each column of numbers or text to a certain width, you can easily create a program that will parse through this file and get totals broken down by category, date range, or seller. Here is what some recent journal entries look like:

Date       Cost      Tax   Item                        Ctgy     Seller   
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
05-19     16.99     2.54   Trailer 2 Inch Ball         ST       COOP-PH
05-19    155.82    23.37   Machinery Gas               GDO      ESSO-MABOU
05-21    213.91    32.06   BBJ Graphics Design         EE       FIVERR
05-21    235.60    35.34   Trailer Ceiling Pine        AE       KENT-INV
05-24    661.42    33.08   Farmhouse Power (6 months)  E        EMERA
05-24   1040.11    52.01   Barn Power (6 months)       E        EMERA
05-25   1413.04   211.69   Deposit for Villages        EE       FELDMAN
05-25     44.83     0.00   Wire Transfer Fee           IBC      WISE
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In the above, Date is MM-DD formatted. To repetitively include the year seems like extra work. I only record cost and sales tax amounts, not the total amount because generally in accounting the (before tax) cost and the sales tax are the quantities you end up dealing with separately for year end income tax and sales tax reporting. I provide a brief description of the expense, the category I assigned it to, and where I purchased it from.

Coming up with a category structure for coding your expenses is a critical part of expense journaling. I have a longer list of farm expense categories, but these are the ones used in the expense journaling above.

[ST] Small Tools
[GDO] Gasoline, diesel fuel, and oil
[EE] Event Expenses
[AE] Accomodation Expenses
[E] Electricity
[IBC] Interest and Bank Charges

How long a record should you create for each expense? You may want to limit yourself to around 80 characters. Why? Because you can easily print it off if you want to and review/share it with your business partners. If your business partners are using the same coding system and formatting for their own expense journals, you could also consider merging your expense journals to get the full picture on your business expenses.

One way I am starting to think about expense journaling is like a dietary journal where you try to record every calorie you are eating (expenses). You can then compare that to how many calories you burning off (income) and balance them out in some way.

The expense journaling system is still a work in progress.