Getting Started: Overview of Crops and Flexible Units

Overview:

It is critical to make sure that your Crop Settings are correct because Crop Settings are the foundation for other functions throughout Traction Enterprise such as Profit Analyzer, Crop and Field Plans, and Reports.

Requirements:

• Work with your Customer Success Manager or Customer Support to ensure that the crops you grow and work with are added to your account.
  • If you need additional crops added to your account, contact Customer Support.
  • If you are growing non-GMOs, organic, or crops like potatoes, almonds, walnuts, and pecans that need to be tracked by individual variety, contact Customer Support or call (888) 972-6649 to set this up.

Answer:

While choosing your Crop Settings on the Setup>Crops page.  You will notice multiple tabs - Available Units, Default Settings, and Price Estimates.  These tabs help you customize each Harvest Product by setting your Units of Measure, setting shrink, and estimated pricing.

Available Units

The Available Units section lets you select or define new units (volume or mass) that your operation might use to transfer and store crops. For example, some farms prefer to see their transfers in pounds while others use bushels.

A banner along the top indicates the Base Unit that was set for this crop. This cannot be edited.  All other units are converted to the Base Unit.

To create a custom unit, select Other and add the name of the custom unit. You must also add an abbreviation and define the conversion rate back to the base unit before saving.

Default Settings

The Default Settings section lets you select which available unit to display. Change these as often as necessary, but changes to display units affect future transfers only.

There are two types of Display Units:

• Unit for Crop Transfers: Used to display quantities (such as Gross, Tare, and Net) in crop transfers.
• Unit for Final Quantities: Used to display crop quantities in inventory and yield and production quantities in revenue forecasts and yield reports.

Tips:

• Make changes to your display units before you assign your Crop Plans to fields.
• Display Unit changes made after field assignments are not reflected on existing Tasks.
• Make sure the crop units displayed on existing Harvest Tasks are correct before you enter harvest data.

Shrink Settings

Traction Enterprise lets you determine the shrink factor and target moisture for applicable crops and then uses these settings to automatically calculate dry bushels based on industry standard formulas.

• Your new harvest settings are applied forward to new harvest loads that are logged; therefore, set the appropriate harvest settings before harvest begins.
• Set the default Crop Shrink Factor on the Default Settings tab.
• Set the Target Moisture on the Default Settings tab. Target Moisture is the default percent moisture to which you expect to dry your crop.

Price Estimates

Traction Enterprise uses the Price Estimates (and Estimated Yield) specified on each harvest task to determine the Planned Production Revenue of a particular crop type on the Profit Analyzer.

• Planned Revenue is based on the estimated quantity specified in a harvesting task  multiplied by the Price Estimate entered during Setup for that harvest product.

Planned Revenue = Estimated Quantity x Price Estimate

• Actual Revenue is calculated by taking the harvested quantity of a crop product delivered to a storage location and multiplying it by the weighted average price specified in contracts.

Actual Revenue = Harvested Quantity x Weighted Average Unit Price

• Forecasted Revenue represents the current revenue estimate for the entire production cycle. Forecasted revenue depends on whether a task is complete or incomplete.
  • If Task is incomplete: Forecasted Revenue for task = Planned Revenue for task
  • If Task is complete: Forecasted Revenue for task = Actual Revenue for task

Related Articles:
What crops does Traction Enterprise support?
How do I track revenue for Non-GMO and organic crops?