Setup a milk tracker (NZ)

How to setup a milk tracker for a New Zealand farm

Alexandra Henley avatar
Written by Alexandra Henley
Updated over a week ago

Adding a new milk tracker

You can have as many milk trackers as you wish, provided you have either a unique set of sales / purchase accounts setup or multi-farm enabled.

Head over to Operations > Trackers > Create New Tracker on the following page select Milk from the list provided.

To create a new milk tracker, you'll need to enter a name and the milk company that you supply milk.

Configuring your milk tracker

On creating you'll be taken to the milk tracker settings page, you can get back to this page at any time by going to Operations > Milk tracker > Tracker settings.

Here you can update the operation type, account mapping, levies, farm manager settings, loan account, supply number, and how you record your milk income in your accounting software.

Operation type

The operation type defaults to farm owner but this can be changed to share milker or contract milker depending on your farming operation.

  • Share milker – If you choose share milker, you’ll see an extra field to enter the percentage of milk income you receive

  • Contract milker – If you choose contract milker, you’ll see an extra field to enter the $ per kgMS of milk income you receive

Selecting farm owner gives you the option to add either a share or contract milker via the Farm Manager settings.

Account mapping

In Figured you will need only two main milk income accounts. These accounts are this season income and deferred season income.

Levies

You can select to automatically calculate the Dairy NZ levies based on your planned milk production each month. If you select yes, you'll need to map a levies account.

Supply number

Here you can select to setup live Fonterra feeds which will bring in your kgMS produced each month. Check out how to do that here.

Farm manager settings

If you're a farm owner you can select to add a share or contract milker, check out how to do that here.

Recording milk income in your accounting software

To make sure actual payments are shown in the tracker correctly, you need to select the cash / accrual mode in your milk tracker.

If you cash code payments in your accounting software (receive money transactions) select No. If you record them as sales invoices then select Yes.

Fonterra loan account

And finally, you can select to map your Fonterra loan account so that'll automatically be associated with your milk tracker.

Once you're happy with your setup, you can hit save changes at the bottom of the milk tracker.

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