Building a new year's plan used to mean copying over each individual tracker and your planning grid one at a time. Copy from Historical combines all of that into one easy step, so you can go from a blank new year to a full starting forecast in minutes.
What Copy from Historical does
Copy from Historical copies data from a date range you choose in a previous year into the equivalent dates in your new year, across:
Your Milk trackers — copies price and production, and lets the tracker recalculate milk income for the new year
Your Livestock trackers — copies transactions, grouped and summed by month
Your Inventory tracker — copies purchased and/or homegrown transactions, summed by month
Your Planning Grid — copies operating income, direct costs, operating expenses, non-operating income and expenses, and non-operating movements
NOTE: Currently Copy from Historical is not available for Multi-Farm, it is coming soon.
Before you start
A few things worth knowing before you start:
Copy from Historical only touches the sections you select — anything you don't select is left completely untouched in your new year (nothing is copied, and nothing is cleared)
For any section you do select, your destination year's forecast in that section is cleared first, then replaced with the copied data
Some accounts are never touched by a rollover of actuals, regardless of what you select — this includes accounts mapped to assets or liabilities (e.g. principal and interest repayments), overdraft interest, livestock and homegrown crop valuation movement accounts, and any system accounts from your accounting software (e.g. Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, GST)
Accounts that dynamically calculate off another farm metric (e.g. off your milk tracker's kgMS) aren't copied into directly — they'll recalculate automatically based on your new tracker data
Rounding
You have the ability to round copied values to the nearest whole number (cents will be removed) or you can set to another value eg $10, $100, $1000. If you choose to round values to the nearest $100 for example you will get the values below:
$20 would round to $0
$74 would round to $100
$1,116 would round to $1,100
etc
Choosing what to include: Trackers
All trackers are viewed in profit (accrual) view only so all profit transaction dates will be used when copied.
Milk: copies price and production from your source dates into the new dates; the tracker then recalculates milk income itself. This means dollar values from your accounting software aren't copied directly, so don't expect these to match exactly.
Livestock: copies all transactions from the tracker(s) and dates you select, grouped by month as if entered manually in the tracker's monthly view. Births, deaths and reconciling transactions are copied as single dated entries. Auto aging will be applied after copy. If you have multiple trackers of the same type - intere tracker transfers will only be copied if you selected both the to and from tracker to be copied.
Inventory: copies purchased and/or homegrown transactions (as selected) from the date range and basis you choose. If a crop season is involved, you'll be asked to choose a destination tracker (this can be the same tracker).
Choosing what to include: Financial sections
In the Planning Grid section of the tool, you can choose from:
Operating Income, Direct Costs, and Operating Expenses (cash or accrual)
Non-Operating Income & Expenses (cash or accrual)
Non-Operating Movements (cash view only, this is unticked by default)
Transactions are summed and grouped per month. If you copy on a profit (accrual) basis, the cash date for each new transaction is calculated from the account's payment period; if you copy on a cash basis, the accrual date is back-calculated the same way.
NOTE: Inventory-related transactions that contain products are not included here — these are copied as part of the Inventory tracker option instead.
Planning Notes
You have the ability to copy any planning notes too. If ticked the same basis as above will be used and all existing notes will be removed. If you choose not to copy notes any existing notes will remain and no new notes will be copied.
How to use Copy from Historical
From your Planning Grid, click on Tools menu - Copy from Historical
Choose the source date range you want to copy from. You don't need to copy a full year — for example, you can copy just 3 months if that's all you need. Dates are automatically advanced by one year into your new plan
Choose the date horizon to copy: full actuals, actuals + forecast, or full forecast
Select which trackers and financial sections you want to include (see below for what each option covers)
For financial sections, choose whether to copy on a cash or accrual basis
Choose whether to include planning notes, and set a rounding preference if you'd like amounts rounded to the nearest dollar value (e.g. nearest $100)
Click Next and review the settings, then click Start Copy
Now your rollover is complete, review your new year and make any adjustments you need directly in the Planning Grid or trackers
