Those who don't actually farm, or ranch often harp on needing to know your cost of production, but rarely provide solutions beyond "good records" to help calculate this ever-changing number. The challenge with developing a true cost of production is that expenses for farms and ranches often span multiple years. Reports in accounting software often utilize the calendar year as a boundary that must be overcome.

To surmount this boundary in Quicken, using a multiple tag system is recommended. The multiple tag system, at minimum, identifies the commodity, the year the commodity is produced and the year when livestock is born.

Tags can help you glean this information from your Quicken file without complicating your category list.

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