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Farm Finances Simplified - The New Barn2Door Finance Academy
215 Plays3 years ago
In this episode of the Direct Farm Podcast, we talk finances with Taylor Bridges. Taylor is an accountant, Farmer, and certified Quickbooks ProAdvisor working directly with Farmers to help manage their books. She's also the instructor of Barn2Door's new Finance Academy!
Gain a sneak peek of what to expect in Barn2Door's three-course Finance Academy, including best practices for agricultural book-keeping, how to streamline your finances, and tips to ensure your books are in order!
barn2door.com/resources
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Transcript
Introduction to The Direct Farm Podcast
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to the Direct Farm Podcast, the weekly listen for farm selling direct. We'll talk about the four levers for farm success, which are quality, brand, price, and convenience. We'll hear from outside industry experts and producers like you to delight your customers, save time, and to increase your direct farm sales and business. We're glad you're here.
Meet Taylor Bridges: Accountant and Hobby Farmer
00:00:25
Speaker
Welcome to the Direct Farm Podcast. I'm Rory, your host for today's episode. We've got a great conversation for you today with Taylor Bridges. Taylor is an accountant certified as a QuickBooks Pro Advisor working with farmers. She and her family are also hobby farmers themselves at their home in Virginia, and she is the instructor of the new Barnador Financial Academy. Welcome, Taylor. I'm really excited to have you here and dive into today's topic.
00:00:49
Speaker
Hey, Rory. It's really exciting to be here today. So first to start out, you have a little bit of a background in agriculture. Could you tell us about that?
Taylor's Farming Background
00:00:57
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah. I grew up in rural Virginia and a really pretty area in the mountains. Middle school and high school, I was a member of FFA. I showed kata machine locally and really enjoyed that. We always wanted to show steers cause it looked like so much fun, but we didn't have the land for that. So we did gardening and showed produce and stuff at the fair as well.
00:01:17
Speaker
That's awesome. Yeah. I actually, I grew up doing 4-H a lot and we kind of had the same thing. We had the room for pigs, but we didn't have the room for cows. All right. Well, so yeah, what was that experience like as an FFA member? Could you tell us about that and how you went through that program?
00:01:33
Speaker
Yeah, I absolutely love being part of the FFA. I was super blessed to be part of a really incredible and active chapter. We hosted education days where we could bring in animals and things like that to the local elementary school and teach the kids all about things ag related. And that was probably my favorite day every year. Cause you got to miss school to play with animals, right? Yeah. I used to.
00:01:55
Speaker
Food science competitions and a public speaking style contest called agricultural issues. When I was a senior in high school, we placed first at the state level, which meant we got to go to Indianapolis to national convention and compete again, which was probably one of the best experiences, very wholesome. My only regret would be not being more active in the competition sooner and not running for an officer position.
00:02:16
Speaker
Yeah, I mean those conventions, especially that national convention in Indianapolis, Barnador actually was able to go last year and it is something else. It is quite the experience. I think last year there were like 60,000 kids at the Indiana Convention Center. It is wild.
00:02:32
Speaker
Absolutely. You can't imagine there's that many kids from so many different places, all of one little building, which I guess is really a big building. Yeah, no, they definitely make it work. Well, so what kind of
Current Farming Activities
00:02:46
Speaker
farming do you do now? I know you're in a rural area of Virginia and you guys have some stuff going on at your place. What are you guys kind of doing just as for hobbies? Right now we raise horses and bees. So we do a lot of trail riding.
00:03:00
Speaker
And I am training my horse right now to do mountain shooting competitions, which is super fun and a little different. You get to dress up in Renaissance wear and everything. It's really nice. And we're looking at getting back into chickens in the spring. So that'll be really cool.
00:03:16
Speaker
We are currently looking for a Jersey cow that will be named Maggie right now. That's awesome. That's really cool and great to hear that the farm is expanding. That's super fun. It's a good time for it. Virginia is really lucky right now to really have the rains and the grass and everything. Yeah, we talked about this history and this passion, I guess, that you had for agriculture growing
Career Path in Accounting
00:03:37
Speaker
up. How did you end up as an accountant? Where did you take that turn and how did you end up as you are today?
00:03:43
Speaker
So in school, I really always liked numbers and things that had concrete answers. There wasn't wiggle room. High school, I worked on an associate's degree in business administration, and we had a course in finance required. And I realized I really liked that. And when I got my hands on some actual books in-house at a job later on, I was hooked. So when my husband and I decided that we were ready to have kids, we knew I was going to stay home with them.
00:04:07
Speaker
And while I was home, I decided it was the right time to go back into school again and pursue a degree in accounting. So I finished a bachelor's degree in accounting and I'm actually wrapping up a master's degree as well. And all of that eventually just led to me opening my own firm and I really love what I do.
00:04:25
Speaker
Yeah, that's awesome. And that's a really cool thing that you can do as a mom still being at home. And congratulations on almost finishing up your master's. That's awesome. Thank you. One day at a time. Yeah, definitely.
QuickBooks as a Tool for Farmers
00:04:36
Speaker
Well, we kind of mentioned in the intro there as well that you're a QuickBooks pro advisor. So maybe to start out, how is QuickBooks helpful as a tool? Obviously QuickBooks online, it's a really common tool for small businesses, but how is it helpful as a tool to farmers running a small business?
00:04:51
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. QuickBooks is probably the number one accounting software right now anyways. It rocks really. It's mobile and it's really accessible anywhere for you or for anyone who's helped me with your books, which makes life just a lot easier for really busy farmers. I think things that are easier like having the app on your phone mean that you're a lot more likely to utilize them and really keep up with it. And it's that QuickBooks integrates with a lot of other apps and anything else you can make a sale on.
00:05:17
Speaker
So all that information goes into their QuickBooks without any extra work for the farmer and I think that is a really key feature. QuickBooks even keeps copies of their receipts so there's no more shoebox in the closet or scrambling come January when you want to do your taxes. Their reports really make the planning a lot easier so farmers can guide their business in the right direction.
00:05:37
Speaker
Awesome. Yeah, definitely just saving so much time. And like you said, it integrates with so many things. One of the things that integrates with is Barnadore. I also mentioned that you're a QuickBooks Pro Advisor. And for someone that doesn't know, including myself, what does that mean? So a QuickBooks Pro Advisor is someone that has a lot of experience with the nuances of QuickBooks in accounting and they can prove it. So
00:05:59
Speaker
They're really good at the day to day operations and at troubleshooting issues and really just getting the most out of the different options that the QuickBooks software platform offers. It's like having your own outsourced accounting department at your fingertips when there's a pro advisor involved. Okay, cool. What did you have to do to get that certification?
00:06:17
Speaker
To get pro-advisor certification, you have to sit through hours of courses, pass a series of tests that Intuit develops, just proves that you know the software and you know what you're doing. And then additionally, there's also annual recertification courses and exams that you have to do in order to keep being certified with them. Well, I know you work with a few different farmers today as their accountant. What are the ways that you work with farms and farm clients today? And what does that work entail that you're doing with them?
Role of QuickBooks Pro Advisor
00:06:46
Speaker
Today, I get to work with a lot of different foreign clients in different ways. I regularly handle the bookkeeping tasks that help keep them organized and paid. I help my clients with enforcing their own customers, paying bills, and cleaning up historical data. Sometimes even doing their payroll for them.
00:07:00
Speaker
Usually I handle their behind the scenes tasks and then we will touch base regularly and just address issues as they arrive. But no two days are ever really the same because my farm clients are all really unique. Some grow and sell meat animals or artisanal dairy products. Some run horse barns and Airbnb's and I even have an international lawn with fiber cooperative. Really unique and it has its own set of different issues that I wasn't expecting. Honestly, you never know what I'm gonna expect whenever I open my computer every morning.
00:07:30
Speaker
One of my favorite things to do is run reports so we can kind of help plan the growth of the farmers and how their businesses are going to go so they can really.
00:07:39
Speaker
rise to their full potential and I think that benefits everyone really. That's what it's about. I feel like that's something we've always continually been learning at Barnador as well is that farmers run into very unique challenges and cases and being able to have I mean at least somebody with your background and a little bit of experience and a little bit of a specialization working with farmers that's got to go a really long ways when they reach out to you and are working with you.
00:08:04
Speaker
It really does. I understand that they're up at 5 a.m. or business does not end at Saturday at two o'clock and. Yeah, exactly.
00:08:16
Speaker
Yeah, no days off. So when it comes to farming and accounting, really, and managing their own books, because a lot of farms are trying to do this on their own. But if they do reach out to you, what are some of those kind of biggest or most common challenges that you see farmers running into when they are managing their
Common Bookkeeping Challenges for Farmers
00:08:31
Speaker
books? I think the most common issues I find with farmers is
00:08:35
Speaker
Making things more complicated than they have to be by trying to wear all the hats, like you said. Handling just everything themselves and never asking questions. Maybe not utilizing things that make their life easier and not keeping them current because it's not easier. For example, I think I find a lot of farmers don't realize the QuickBooks app has a receipt capture feature, so they don't have to keep those paper receipts all the time and find them in glove boxes. I think that using some of those tools would probably make life a lot easier for them.
00:09:04
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. And then also, you know, kind of working with someone like you, could you maybe speak to that as well? What is the added benefit? Say a farmer starts using QuickBooks online to manage their books. What's the additional benefit of working with an accountant like you that might make their lives even more easier?
00:09:20
Speaker
So I think one of the biggest benefits is the time and stress savings, you have someone on your side that knows what they're doing, they take so many hours off your plate where you could really just work on things that only you as the farmer and the person in charge can handle.
00:09:35
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. I think that's something we see a lot here too, especially with our farm account managers and being able to provide just that additional support too, even just to have somebody, if you run into an issue or sometimes things update and it's like, Oh, this is a whole new thing I didn't know existed before. And having somebody to go to and be able to help you through that, it goes a really long ways, especially when farmers are so pressured for time and every hour counts.
00:09:58
Speaker
Absolutely. And especially when you have someone on your side and they can answer your questions before there is an actual issue and you can solve it, it doesn't have to be a problem. That makes a world of difference too. Yeah, especially in this realm where a problem is a very big problem. Like if your financials are off or if you're not keeping your books right, especially in the off chance that you're getting audited or anything like that, it is a really
00:10:21
Speaker
pressure filled a place where you don't want to make mistakes. So having that extra health definitely goes a long ways. I'm curious how do you specifically as a farmer accountant, how do you help farmers navigate those
Importance of Simplified Systems
00:10:32
Speaker
challenges?
00:10:32
Speaker
One of the best things I found to help farmers navigate those challenges is to help them develop and implement systems that make it really difficult not to be successful. Taking some of the load and the stress off their plate so they can handle all those higher level decisions I mentioned and do the things that they're made to do best. So we work on automating processes like transaction entries or paying bills. So they don't even have to worry about those kinds of things. Just poof gone. We like to come up with routines and accountability for other things.
00:11:00
Speaker
like receipts or getting paid as a business owner. So planning and their lives in general just become a lot easier for them and their families. Of course, a lot of times they enjoy handing off tasks that take up hours and hours of their time. So they get the peace of mind and they don't have to do it anymore. But it really works out well this way because I know the ins and outs of their operations. I keep open communication with all my clients so we can really prevent problems before they happen and it's not such a big deal.
00:11:24
Speaker
Yeah. Wow. That is awesome. I feel like one, the time savings alone is so great, but then also kind of walking through and what you spoke to there about having a little more foresight with where you're headed and the direction of your company is so helpful for farms, especially if they are trying to grow or if they have goals to expand their business, that's got to be a really helpful asset that you're providing.
00:11:46
Speaker
Absolutely. It's really hard to grow if you don't know where you're at right
Accounting's Role in Farm Operations
00:11:49
Speaker
now. Yeah. So what role, I guess, does an accountant play in farm business, I guess, to break that down a little further? Well, whether operations small or large, running a farm requires a lot of hard work. I know it's something farmers usually they invest their entire lives into. It's not
00:12:06
Speaker
Monday to Friday sign off at five o'clock and you're done. So it's really a lifestyle and that's something I totally understand. It's also important to get help when you need it though and accounting is something that a lot of people could probably use help with because there's just so many different niches and nuances and it's not like the regular retail store in a mall. There's always something different. Every operation has something
00:12:28
Speaker
special and unique about it, which is what makes it so awesome. Accounting can really help take over a lot of the things that stress farmers out and help with future planning. So with accurate real-time numbers, they can work with that and they don't have to cringe when they sit down and look at their books because it's already taken care of. So having an accountant on their side to handle the heavy lifting really just enables them to have a really solid grasp of the financial side of their operation. These numbers give farmers a better chance of getting tax deductions or selected for a grant.
00:12:56
Speaker
they have a much more accurate financial picture. So that seems to be a big deal. Yeah, that's huge. Because I know a lot of farms use grants to expand or to pay for some of their different equipment and things like that. So being able to have all that accurate up to date financial information, really just that peace of mind that what they're submitting is correct. That's definitely got to go a really long ways.
00:13:17
Speaker
Absolutely.
New Financial Academy Course
00:13:18
Speaker
So starting in August and this is I'm really excited to talk with you about this but Barnador is going to be launching a new financial academy and you'll be the instructor. So academies for listeners that don't know we currently offer academies in areas like social media or MailChimp. This one's going to be completely focused on finances and it's a three-week course basically with one class a week and each class is about an hour long. What are you most excited for about leading this class and specifically leading farmers in this class?
00:13:48
Speaker
I'm excited about all of it. Really. I'm really excited to help all the farmers that get to attend, just grow their knowledge and their confidence so they can grow their farms with all the things that they're going to learn. And ultimately I think that really benefits everyone benefits them, their families and their communities. That's a really wholesome opportunity. Yeah. It's going to be really great. We're excited to have you do it. So what are some of the areas of farm business finance that this class is going to dive into and cover over the course of those three classes?
00:14:17
Speaker
Yeah, so like you mentioned, it's a three level course. So each one will break it down a little bit differently. So we're gonna look at how QuickBooks and Barnadore work together. It's like magic. It's hands down probably the best option software wise. The best practices for agricultural bookkeeping. We'll look at reconciliations, some financial statements and ratios and touch base on taxes and really just a lot of stuff. So it's gonna be really helpful information and it's gonna be a lot of fun honestly.
00:14:44
Speaker
Yeah. And I think even just hearing you list off all the things that we're going to cover, it can be a little intimidating, but I think that's the point of this class is to break down some of those barriers and simplify things, walk through it all step by step. I know I've got to see a lot of the content that we're going to be working with.
00:15:01
Speaker
And it really is going to be a really great class because it breaks things down, makes things simple. And you've provided a lot of your great knowledge and input and feedback and screenshots of examples. So I think it's going to be a really great class to walk farmers through and help set them up for success on these other areas. Like we've talked about, if they're looking to grow, if they're looking to just maintain their business, but better manage their books, it's going to be really exciting. I think there's going to be something for everyone during the three classes.
Conclusion and Additional Resources
00:15:28
Speaker
It's totally worth it. Yeah.
00:15:30
Speaker
Yeah, diving into financials, it doesn't always sound like the most fun. So why should farmers be excited, genuinely excited for this class? Oh, I think farmers should be really excited because knowledge is power. And having a handle on their business finances really just, it brings an unparalleled level of peace to the table. And if something's unavoidable, like financials are, then we might as well make it a lot easier and pleasant. And that's exactly what this class is going to offer them the chance to do.
00:15:58
Speaker
Yeah, awesome. That's a great way to look at it. You got to do it. So might as well be good at it. Unavoidable.
00:16:06
Speaker
Awesome. I want to extend my thanks to Taylor for joining us on this week's podcast episode. Here at Barn to Door, we're humbled to support thousands of farmers across the country who implement sustainable agricultural practices and support their local community. For more information on bridging the gap financial services, you can visit btgfinancialservices.com. To learn more about Barn to Door, including access to numerous free resources and best practices for your farm, you can go to barn to door.com slash resources. Thank you for tuning in. We'll see you next week.
00:16:39
Speaker
Thank you for listening to this episode of the Direct Farm podcast. You can subscribe anywhere you listen to podcasts to automatically download new episodes. For more free resources that you can read, watch, and listen to, visit farntador.com slash resources. Thank you again for tuning in and we'll see you again next week.