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Livestock trackers - Tools & tips
Updating your livestock tracker opening and closing balances
Updating your livestock tracker opening and closing balances

How opening and closing balances work in livestock

Matt McLaughlin avatar
Written by Matt McLaughlin
Updated over a week ago

If you want to update your opening Livestock Tracker quantities you have come to the right place. Check out how to Setup a Livestock Tracker if you have not created one.

As a best practice workflow, we recommend keeping your stock rec up to date by using the stock balancer. If you need to update your previous year's tracker then read on.

Quick tips:

  • If this is your first year entering data in Figured, your opening balance will be added in the Tracker Settings

  • Your opening balance is determined by your previous year's closing balance

  • A '0' figure in your Variation column suggests your yearly movements have been accounted for. This may be out if you haven't entered your Target Closing or updated your yearly movements

Understanding your tracker columns

  • Opening balance - this year's opening balance stock quantities

  • Birth - used to record births for each individual stock class

  • Purchase - used to record purchases against individual stock class

  • Aging in - helps to monitor stock quantities that are aging into each stock class note: transactions cannot be entered into this column. Only aging out transactions can be entered and this is where the stock numbers are pulled from

  • Aging out - used to record stock quantities aging out of individual stock classes

  • Sale - used to record sales against individual stock class

  • Death - used to record deaths for each individual stock class

  • Reconciling - used to record unaccounted stock changes for each individual stock class e.g. missing or found stock

  • Closing balance - this year's closing balance stock quantities

  • Target closing - This years target closing balance- often used to assist in reconciling the livestock for EOY valuations as seen below

  • Variation - This is the variation between the opening stock and closing stock columns. It is an indicator whether reconciling is needed.

Updating your tracker

Firstly, be sure you have the global date selector in the correct year e.g. if you want to update your 2022 opening stock then toggle back to your 2021 years actuals such as this example below.

NOTE: Figures in your Closing column are what show for next year's opening stock. The numbers in the variation column below suggest we have further adjustments to reconcile. This image shows individual account mapping (common for the NZ market).

If you're wanting a quick shortcut to manipulate your opening stock, you can use the previous year's Reconciling column to change your Closing by entering a positive or negative reconciling transaction (shown below). Although we strongly recommend you enter all your previous year's entries to generate accurate reporting data.

A positive Variation column means you have less closing stock compared to your target closing e.g. you sold some Heifers during the year but forgot to decrease your target closing stock accordingly.

A negative Variation column means you have additional stock compared to your target closing e.g. you purchased more Heifers during the year but didn't increase your target closing accordingly.

Once you have diagnosed the problem, update any sales, purchases, aging, births, or deaths to reconcile the Variation column to 0. This can be done by selecting the stock class and entering the relevant numbers.

To post sale or purchase actuals to preferred account software, check out Reconciling your Livestock Tracker. For more information on Livestock Tracker forecasting, check out our article on using a Livestock Tracker.

For video tutorials check out our YouTube Livestock Tracker playlist here.

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