Poultry finance records are one of several flock performance indicators that you should keep. However, doing this can appear confusing when you have more than one flock in your farm.
A number of poultry farmers have reached out to us in this regard. Essentially, asking how to easily track flock finances for all coops where they’ve more than 1 coop. Generally, there are 2 ways to achieving this:
- Keeping finance records for each flock separately
- Combining finance records for all flocks into one
In this article we unpack 2 ways how you can keep poultry finance records – on Kukufarm poultry management app – when you’ve more than 1 coop. Furthermore, we will do a pros and cons analysis of each the two options.
In addition, here is a video we had done on the issue of combining multi-coop flock records into one.
What are poultry finance records?
As we done stated, poultry finance records are a key flock performance indicator that you have to keep track of. Fundamentally, there are at least three reasons for tracking poultry finances:
- Understand flock performance overtime
- Measure the performance of your poultry farming operations
- Practice data based poultry farming and decisions making
Without tracking poultry finances, you cannot do any of the above. In any case, you will find yourself resulting to guesswork when making flock management decisions. Unfortunately, we think guesswork will often result to failure.
2 Ways of tracking poultry finance records
Keep poultry finance records for each coop
In our view, it is important to track the performance of each flock separately. In fact, Kukufarm poultry app, which you can get on Google Play and App Store, is built around this notion.
The main advantage to keeping poultry finance records for each coop (flock) is that you can track the financial performance of each coop separately. Additionally, this means that when you archive flock data for future reference, that data will be comprehensive because it will contain respective sales and expenses.
One caveat to keeping poultry finance records for each coop is it requires you to breakdown the numbers. For instance, if you buy poultry feeds in bulk, you have to track the amounts consumed in each coop, and therefore the feed expenses respectively.
However, since we are talking about data based poultry farming, there is no shortcut to tracking individual flock performance. For example, if you want to track feed conversion ratio for your flocks, you have to track feed consumed, thus feed costs for each individual flock.
Pros and cons for keeping flock finances separately
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| You get a detailed performance data for each flock, for immediate action and future reference | Requires extra work of breaking down sales and expenses for each coop / flock |
| Supports data based farming including feed conversion ratio | |
| Supports data informed flock management | |
Track poultry finance records in one coop
The alternative to keeping poultry finance records for each coop is combining finance records for all coops.
For instance, this would mean that if you have 5 coops, instead of logging respective sales and expenses for each coop, you simply log all finance data to coop 1.
Pros and cons for combining flock finances
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Requires no extra effort to breakdown finance data for each flock / coop | You lose the ability to track and understand individual flock performance |
| Some flocks (active and archived) will miss financial performance data | |
| Cannot calculate FCR and other individual flock performance indicators | |
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