BF 204: Quickbooks for Farmers

Building Farm Financial Records to Measure Success

This course is an introduction to QuickBooks, designed to provide an overview of the QuickBooks Pro software application. It will cover the basic features, such as sales tax, inventory, invoicing, adjustments, and year-end procedures. Students will gain hands-on experience in the concepts presented, as well as guidance on applying the concepts to their own farm.

PLEASE NOTE: QuickBooks software is NOT included in this course and will need to be purchased separately if you want to use it long-term on your farm. You can participate in this course using the free 30-day trial of the online version of QuickBooks; your instructors will provide instructions to get started with this.

While the course is instructor-led with weekly webinars for 6 weeks out of the year, students will be able to proceed at their own pace through the course material.

Target Audience

All levels: This course is appropriate for people at all levels of farm experience who seek to get started using QuickBooks for their farm business record-keeping. Some understanding of elementary bookkeeping and accounting principles are helpful, and some previous exposure to QuickBooks will make the acquisition of skills much easier but is not essential. If you are actively using QuickBooks and would like to improve your use of the software, this course may be too basic for you. Read through the syllabus below to make sure the topics covered will be useful.

Course Objectives

After competing the 6-week course, including hands-on practice, students will:

• Show proficiency in setting up chart of accounts, item lists, customer lists and vendor lists
• Be able to track income, whether using invoices or not
• Be able to track expenses
• Know what reports can be useful to them to monitor business finances
• Know year-end closing and other year-end procedures
• Know how to backup and restore data files

Webinars and Schedule

The bulk of the course happens on your own time, with discussions, readings, and assignments in Teachable. To add to the experience, webinars will be woven into the interface of the course for 6 weeks each year to allow you to meet on a weekly basis to learn from presenters and ask questions in real time. If you miss one, they are always recorded and posted for later viewing.

Webinars

Live instruction for the 2021-2022 season has ended, and the next live session will be in late September 2022. While we encourage live attendance so you have the opportunity to engage with the presenters and ask questions, all webinars are recorded and posted in our online classroom for students to watch anytime. Once you have enrolled in this course, you will retain access to all materials indefinitely, and can return to participate in the live webinars in future offerings of the course if you wish.