Financial Statements for FS

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SimpleFarmer
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Financial Statements for FS

Post by SimpleFarmer »

FS for FS
Financial statements for FS. They are here. "This is happening." - Jurassic World
Easily tracks financial progress over time in a more realistic and accurate way. Prepares actual financial statements for board reviews, investor proposals, or loan applications.
Requires excel for optimal results.
--
For anyone out there who isn't an accountant, the in-game financial windows are not representative of actual financial progress. For one thing, buying a half-million dollar vehicle isn't a half-million dollar expense on the same day. It's just a trade of one asset (cash) for another (equipment). Nothing was actually given up. Over time though, as the equipment loses value, you start to incur the expense. Basic accounting there, but the in-game info isn't very accurate for tracing gain or loss on things like animals or equipment over time. That is why these can be very useful.
If you take your time in this game, and every new year is a big deal, these are most likely for you, as you probably put a lot of time into the year and would like to know accurately how you did. If you just fly through the days, half aware you're making money but taking out loans and GS's because you really aren't, well these will only slow you down on your break-neck pace to nowhere. Just continue on, you're doing great.
These were initially designed with seasons in mind, as there are a few incomes and expenses included in seasons that aren't in the base game (like livery stable income or water costs). It's an easy fix to uninclude them, and based on feedback, I might make another addition for without seasons. (If you don't uninclude them they will always just be 0.)
All the tabs are protected, the password is in the file (its password) but this is just so someone who doesn't really know how to use excel can still play with this and not screw everything up. If you know what you're doing, just unprotect everything and play on. If you don't have Excel, I can attempt to make a version for excel online (free) this one won't work there because it's too big. (Too many colors and graphs). This will most likely not work at all on Google sheets - I'm not even going to try it, there are too many formulas that could go wrong.
Directions for use are in the following post, and hope you enjoy.
SimpleFarmer
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Re: Financial Statements for FS

Post by SimpleFarmer »

Last edited by SimpleFarmer on Thu Mar 12, 2020 7:20 pm, edited 5 times in total.
SimpleFarmer
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Re: Financial Statements for FS

Post by SimpleFarmer »

Directions for use:

First, don't try to edit the document where it is in my Drive, just download it to your computer and open it in Excel. Don't open in Google Sheets, I'm not really sure how this will look in there.

See another post down below somewhere for subsequent years and how to do a rollfoward.

What you will need to know:

Beginning scenario: this is what will be your starting equity. i.e. what you had when you started, whether it was brought in in your back pocket, given to you by a relative, etc. Even when you start from scratch there is still somehow a bunch of starting equity. If you just get rid of everything and start from 0 with a loan, this will be 0. (To note, you're ROE will be always 100% so you know.) Get this all entered before you start and then don't change it. If you do all kinds of GS and leasing activity to get your starting farm just how you want it (on console we use primitive means) just go to the next day before starting your actual game, or it's up to you to figure out how to separate fact from fiction.
Income/Expenditures data for every day - I personally just take a picture of yesterday's #'s every day and when I feel like it I enter them all into the tracker. Trying to play and do this at the same time might not be very fun.
If you want to just start tracking in the middle of a savegame, you can but all your previous transactions will be lumped into existing balances - so no gain/loss will be calculated. An example of this is if you own a few animals you've been growing for awhile, when you sell them, the gain will be from when you started tracking (probably minimal compared to from when you bought them.) If you're super smart you might be able to work backward and figure it out, but I recommend just starting on a new year or even better, a new savegame. In short, this will track income/expense from the time you started tracking.

Current values of equipment, placeables and livestock. You can look up the purchase prices for everything in the shop. Any difference for leveling, etc, for buildings will automatically go to expense. The current value can be found in your garage menu for placeables, and in the equipment menu for equipment. The easiest way to find the current value of livestock I've found is to go to the pen and open the animal dialogue - the estimated sale price is listed by the animal.
To note: most companies in real life have a threshold for whether a piece of equipment is depreciated over time or just expensed at time of purchase - it's usually $5,000 (IRS limit). I would recommend doing this too, you can set your own limit, but entering every little bucket and tool under $5,000 doesn't sound very fun to me. What you don't enter on you asset listing will just be expensed.
Owned livestock note: if you own a ton of animals, and don't feel like counting and multiplying by the estimated sale prices, maybe just take an average or something. The level of accuracy you take here will just be reflected your results.

How it Works:

Data is entered onto the blue tabs and it feeds through some hidden TS tabs (top secret) to the grey tabs. What you own is compared to what you purchased and sold and the differences account for different gains, losses and incomes.
Therefore, if you purchased a $100,000 tractor but don't list it in your asset listing, this will show up as a $100,000 loss. It looks like you bought it and lost it or something ( (money was paid out for it but it's not in your list of owned items). There are built in error messages that will come up if something like this is detected, but there are ways it can still happen. Just be sure to record it in both places. What usually happens is you sell something and forget to remove it, so it looks like you gained a bunch of money from nowhere. To remove items just delete them.
Once your data is entered into the blue tabs, the final cash balance on the I/E tab should reconcile to your in-game window. It rarely does for me because I mis-enter stuff, so depending on how much it is off, I just plug the difference into Other Expense and move on. There is a handy little plug box in the spreadsheet to help you get it right. Depending on how accurate you want to be you can go look day by day and see what day has the problem. Each day should tie to your in-game window.

Informational (result) tabs:
These tabs are the result tabs and the first two are the Balance Sheet and the Income Statement. If you already know what these are then skip this. If you don't, the Balance sheet is where your assets are compared to who owns them. They are either owned by you (equity) or a creditor (Liability). The income statement shows how you made or lost money. This doesn't show you where your cash went or came from, that is the cash flow statement, or I/E window in the game menu. The income statement takes advantage of possibilities like a silo full of wheat, that is worth a lot of money, and could be sold at any time, but isn't shown in the I/E tab, or the amount of depreciation happening on your vehicles every day. If you'd like to know more, look up accrual basis vs cash basis and read on.
Analysis tab: these three profitability ratios are very important in this game. this is where the men are separated from the boys. Sure someone can start with umpteen million dollars worth of equipment and property and net more income than a guy with a very economic setup, but when the bank sees the super low ROA (half the equipment was just sitting around the whole time unused) they aren't going to be impressed. Or in the case of a low ROE, they will see that all of the assets were given to you and you didn't do very much with them. If you want healthy ratios, don't start with a bunch of existing equipment and don't borrow a bunch of money.
If your ratios are just super high, there will show up error messages that you're basically going to jail for unfair business practices. You're probably using mods or techniques that some would consider cheating, either way, we'll see you in court. These will also show up if you just worked really hard, and if that is the case, well done. For example, if you just bought a chainsaw and did 1,000,000 worth of logging by carrying the wood by hand to the mill, you're ROA is going to be super high and the message will pop up but you did nothing wrong. Sorry for the scare, but that's a possibility.
At the time of posting, I haven't tested these out with logging, the return on assets for logging might be unusually high, but I doubt it - the logging equipment is so expensive.

Choosing the number of days: I have two spreadsheet built for either 12 or 24 days. I usually do 12 day years, and just slow the clock down. There are no formulas based on the number of days, so if you change the days during the year, it won't affect anything. The cash flow over time graph won't go past 12 days, I don't even think it's a very useful graph anyway, so I didn't update it for the 24-day spreadsheet. Feel free to if you want it. It's really easy to add columns and days to the I/E tab, so you can probably do it yourself, if you really can't figure it out, or don't want to break it, just let me know and I will do it for you.

Government Subsidies: if you take out a government subsidy and plan on paying it back, that is no problem. Just make sure to update the number in the Facts tab that you cheated in so the spreadsheet knows what to take out of your "Property Income." When you pay it back, (usually by leasing stuff) just enter the leasing costs on the properly income line in the I/E tab, and update the final GS balance on the Facts tab with the lowered amount. (or if you paid it all the way off, just enter 0).
Loans: enter the amount for loans on the I/E tab under the cash balance. IF you started with loans, enter how much they were on the Facts tab. Don't update the beginning loan as you repay them, the beginning tab is a snapshot of where you started, not a current situation.
Finally: I suggest just messing with this before you start. Put in different situations and see the effects on the results to get used to how the worksheet works.
Last edited by SimpleFarmer on Fri Mar 06, 2020 9:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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FarmCatJenkins
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Re: Financial Statements for FS

Post by FarmCatJenkins »

This is pretty awesome! Gonna try it out on Can Farm when I start a new save.
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Dairydeere
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Re: Financial Statements for FS

Post by Dairydeere »

Same here, maybe on CanFarm also, or UMRV (can't decide :lol: ). This is brilliant! Truly a wonder
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SimpleFarmer
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Re: Financial Statements for FS

Post by SimpleFarmer »

FarmCatJenkins wrote: Fri Mar 06, 2020 4:35 am This is pretty awesome! Gonna try it out on Can Farm when I start a new save.
Dairydeere wrote: Fri Mar 06, 2020 5:13 am Same here, maybe on CanFarm also, or UMRV (can't decide :lol: ). This is brilliant! Truly a wonder
Thanks I hope you like it. Let me know if you have any issues or if anything doesn't make sense.
Atomixx
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Re: Financial Statements for FS

Post by Atomixx »

Nice! I will also give it a try! Thx for your work! *thumbsup*
Viele Grüße,

TOM

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humbe
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Re: Financial Statements for FS

Post by humbe »

Nice spreadsheet.. Tested it out for my first year.. Ended up with 0.68 $ income per dollar of assets owned, and $2.09 income per dollar of starting equity (and that's on hard economy;).

Numbers reflect that I get most my income from contracts, and not by working own lands though. Then the number would be far less..

$2.09 matches up pretty well with my own calculations. Not sure I understood how your spreadsheet is intended to handle in detail, as in year 2, 3 and so on, but I'm a computer geek, so if I'm moving my calculations to excel I think I'll be writing my own to make it fit what I want :)..
SimpleFarmer
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Re: Financial Statements for FS

Post by SimpleFarmer »

humbe wrote: Fri Mar 06, 2020 8:44 pm Nice spreadsheet.. Tested it out for my first year.. Ended up with 0.68 $ income per dollar of assets owned, and $2.09 income per dollar of starting equity (and that's on hard economy;).

Numbers reflect that I get most my income from contracts, and not by working own lands though. Then the number would be far less..

$2.09 matches up pretty well with my own calculations. Not sure I understood how your spreadsheet is intended to handle in detail, as in year 2, 3 and so on, but I'm a computer geek, so if I'm moving my calculations to excel I think I'll be writing my own to make it fit what I want :)..
Thanks for the review Humbe, and that makes sense with the contracts income. Theoretically you could have a super high ROE if you never bought a thing and just rented everything for every project... perhaps I will take contracts out of the calculation...
As far as year 2 goes, I am almost done with one to roll forward the year more easily. It's not that hard but there are things like the unreceived revenue that would cause inaccurate results. But I will release that one in a bit.
SimpleFarmer
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Re: Financial Statements for FS

Post by SimpleFarmer »

humbe wrote: Fri Mar 06, 2020 8:44 pm Nice spreadsheet.. Tested it out for my first year.. Ended up with 0.68 $ income per dollar of assets owned, and $2.09 income per dollar of starting equity (and that's on hard economy;).

$2.09 matches up pretty well with my own calculations.
If you're wondering why ROA doesn't quite match up, its probably because we remove interest costs, which the oversimplified formula doesn't show. And I don't really know if the game will match up with real life as far as return on assets or equity, this is due to the difference between the game and real life farming. So far mine basically line up but I have pretty large farms and don't really do contracts at all.
based on more feedback, i'll adjust the error messages to reflect when someone might be "cheating" the game, as of now the game might just be "cheating" real life and everyone will get error messages. If you have a ROA/ROE's that you think are more reasonable let me know. - Maybe we could see what yours would be without contract income or something.
SimpleFarmer
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Re: Financial Statements for FS

Post by SimpleFarmer »

2nd year (or year other than initial)

See link in post above

Overview of a roll-foward: The point of a rollfoward at a new year for businesses is to set a blank slate to measure how well they will do in the new year ahead. You could theoretically go as long as you wanted without rolling foward, but the longer you go, the less meaningful the results are. For example, say a farm manager tells you they have a net income of $200,000 from sometime in the 80's. First of all, lame, and also not very useful. If he says last year he had a net income of $200,000, that is useful.
When a business "rolls forward", they are still using the same assets they used last year, therefore the balance sheet on the last day of the period will be the same as that of the first day of the next period - with one exception: Retained earnings.
Retained earnings is the way the income statement flows into the balance sheet, that is, the way what we earned goes into our back pocket or Shareholder's equity. Sometimes I think accountants named things like shareholder's equity to keep people from doing the accounting themselves. Every year, retained earnings is emptied into Shareholder Equity, and the new year begins.

How this will look in this spreadsheet:
At the end of the year, save your old FS workbook and open a copy of my second/following year workbook.
There will be a few changes from the year 1 WB - first there are 2 new tabs for the PY (Prior Year) IS and BS. Either copy and paste the values in or just enter them by hand - the important thing here is not to change the structure unless you know what you're doing. I have formulas grabbing these values for elsewhere in the WB.
In the Facts tab, you'll notice it pulls existing balances from the old FS's.
The only number you will have to update is the GS number. When you start a new year it will just pull forward from the PY. Any changes to it need to be based on actual income/expenditures in the I.E window in game, or it will just go right on your income statement - and we all know you didn't earn that 1 million of property income. If the property income for a given year is over like 200k a message appears to remind you to enter the GS on both the Facts tab and the Property income line on the I.E tab.
Unreceived revenue: The way accountants usually handle this is with journal entries - unreceived revenue isn't even a real-world income statement account - its normally an asset account called A/R and the revenue is just lumped in with ordinary revenue. For FS4FS (thats a pretty cool name for this huh) this is different. Since the unreceived revenue on your year 1 IS was dumped into your back pocket (right?) putting it on the IS again would make it look like you get it all over again - this can't happen, there's stil the same amount of wheat in your silo. We don't want anyone ending up in trouble with the SEC. So for FS4FS we are just going to be showing the unreceived revenue from the current year. You might notice a few things:
1) if you sell your produce at less than you anticipated in last year's IS, you will see a negative amount here. That's okay, next time just use better judgment :)
2) this amount won't line up with current inventory amounts - that's because you've already recognized the revenue last year for some of the produce in your silo as said above.

That's basically everything new. With livestock, you might notice minimal gains on some animals you know should have higher gains, this is going to be because most of that gain probably happened last year. Starting from a new year its only going to show you gain from the first day of the new cycle - but that's kind of the point.
Last edited by SimpleFarmer on Thu Mar 12, 2020 7:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.
humbe
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Re: Financial Statements for FS

Post by humbe »

I think next time I start a new map, I'll ban contracts, or put in a rule strictly limiting how many I can do. With my current setup and limitations, contracts are way to good so I do a ton of them. Would be a lot of time skipping without them to gain money to extend farm, but then small tools to begin with wouldn't be an issue, and I'd get to use most my playing time to work on my farm instead of others, which I think would be good.

It would be nice to see costs and income from contracts separately (per contract type too for that matter), but it's hard to measure from in game data. Most my harvesting income are from contracts. Half my bale selling income are from contracts. Almost all fuel/maintenance/seed/fertilizer costs are from contracts. To begin with I refueled and repaired after every contract to measure how much that was per contract, but those costs are really low, so currently I stopped bother tracking that.

As it is, I think it's just as well to just model in contracts with the rest, and then one can calculate profits per contract type separately to be able to estimate what percentage of costs and income are contract related if wanted to.

I'm tracking some specifics now to try and calculate what contracts make me the most profit per time unit, and later I'll like to calculate profits from own crops and animal husbandry and the like, but once my calculations are done, I'll stop tracking enough data to be able to separate them correctly.
SimpleFarmer
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Re: Financial Statements for FS

Post by SimpleFarmer »

humbe wrote: Fri Mar 06, 2020 10:36 pm I think next time I start a new map...
I agree on all points - I personally would want to track livestock better, so I know which type is the most profitable to me. This and other individual things require that you gather the data, which a lot of that data has to be gathered in real time. For this project, I didn't think anyone wanted to have to gather data real time, and I was wondering if gathering the day to day data would even be too much for most. Trying to get accurate and informative results based on the few in game tabs is definitely a challenge.
To track things like contracts, because the game doesn't bother splitting it out for you (sigh) you would have to wait until you bought the exact fertilizer you would use, or sold the product and write the number down, because there is no history unfortunately. For me, I want to measure the cost of the foods I am feeding to my animals - especially pigs. But that would require keeping a log of how much was fed to them in total smh - it's a project all on its own. I think I can figure it out, but I'm going to leave it out of these FS's.
I think contracts can just stay in there for now, but I should adjust the normal ratios to more what is normal for the game, including a fair amount of contract work. Like I said, I don't really think anyone cares how the game economy compares to real life, they just don't want to be taking advantage of the game. I'll work on getting more representative ratios this evening. Thanks for the feedback.
Yn0z
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Re: Financial Statements for FS

Post by Yn0z »

SimpleFarmer wrote: Thu Mar 05, 2020 7:40 pm FS for FS
Financial statements for FS. They are here. "This is happening." - Jurassic World
Easily tracks financial progress over time in a more realistic and accurate way. Prepares actual financial statements for board reviews, investor proposals, or loan applications.
Requires excel for optimal results.
--
For anyone out there who isn't an accountant, the in-game financial windows are not representative of actual financial progress. For one thing, buying a half-million dollar vehicle isn't a half-million dollar expense on the same day. It's just a trade of one asset (cash) for another (equipment). Nothing was actually given up. Over time though, as the equipment loses value, you start to incur the expense. Basic accounting there, but the in-game info isn't very accurate for tracing gain or loss on things like animals or equipment over time. That is why these can be very useful.
If you take your time in this game, and every new year is a big deal, these are most likely for you, as you probably put a lot of time into the year and would like to know accurately how you did. If you just fly through the days, half aware you're making money but taking out loans and GS's because you really aren't, well these will only slow you down on your break-neck pace to nowhere. Just continue on, you're doing great.
These were initially designed with seasons in mind, as there are a few incomes and expenses included in seasons that aren't in the base game (like livery stable income or water costs). It's an easy fix to uninclude them, and based on feedback, I might make another addition for without seasons. (If you don't uninclude them they will always just be 0.)
All the tabs are protected, the password is in the file (its password) but this is just so someone who doesn't really know how to use excel can still play with this and not screw everything up. If you know what you're doing, just unprotect everything and play on. If you don't have Excel, I can attempt to make a version for excel online (free) this one won't work there because it's too big. (Too many colors and graphs). This will most likely not work at all on Google sheets - I'm not even going to try it, there are too many formulas that could go wrong.
Directions for use are in the following post, and hope you enjoy.
I really like this and I agree the games finance system blows, you do not make a loss on a given day when you purchase an asset and nor does this impact your profit outlook... these are normal expenditures when running a farm. However, I think that if we really wanna get technical we should also incorpororate labour productivity, if these kind of things matter,actually with seasons allows farmers to determine the return on investment per hour spent on a crop or an activity based on prevailing prices ergo what I mean is it might be better to plant high volume low value crops on small fields given the limited time investment over low volume high value...sorry getting very technical I will stop now...
humbe
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Re: Financial Statements for FS

Post by humbe »

Yn0z wrote: Fri Mar 13, 2020 12:33 pm ... However, I think that if we really wanna get technical we should also incorpororate labour productivity, if these kind of things matter,actually with seasons allows farmers to determine the return on investment per hour spent on a crop or an activity based on prevailing prices ergo what I mean is it might be better to plant high volume low value crops on small fields given the limited time investment over low volume high value...sorry getting very technical I will stop now...
It's good to get technical. Profit compared to invested time is also an important measure, but there's an open question what you are able to do with the time you save. This will for instance differ if you optimize for profit per game time unit or per played time unit. If you optimize for game time unit you can put clock down to real time and have time to do tons of stuff, but if you optimize for played time you'd probably want to set clock speed up, so you're not limited by how fast stuff is happening in game.

For field related bits, I would think it's normal to be limited by amount of fields you have or are able to get with your money. If you prioritize most profit per game time, you may choose the most labor intensive crop as you have plenty of time anyhow in game (at least if running seasons), but if you prioritize real time you may choose the crop that's the least amount of work and rather let in game clock move a lot quicker. Both are perfectly valid approaches..
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