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How an accounting program can help transform a farm

The most financially successful farmers are those who know and understand their financial situation and make changes accordingly.

4 Min Read
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The most financially successful farmers are those who know and understand their financial situation and make changes accordingly. Red Wing Software has been helping farmers grow their profits since 1979, with an agriculture-specific accounting and payroll program. Recently celebrating 40 years in business, Red Wing Software has been collecting customer success stories. Our customers say it best! Let Sam Garner share with you his story of success and transformation with Red Wing Software’s CenterPoint Accounting and Payroll for Agriculture. Here’s the story, as written by Sam.

“The Duncan Farming Group, a family-owned land-holding and farming operation located in South Central, Idaho, is a proud customer of Red Wing Software. Several years ago, we saw a real need and potential benefit in being able to calculate our per unit and per acre cost of production by commodity. With multiple entities, it was a big task to combine all the financial records from individual QuickBooks company files into Excel and then make allocations to the appropriate commodities. I researched multiple software products to find a better solution. I was at an Ag Business Conference in Spokane, WA where I met and learned from Dick Wittman. He mentioned that CenterPoint Accounting for Agriculture was a pretty good product to help calculate costs of production. So, I did even more research and eventually determined that CenterPoint was the best product to fit our needs. We moved everything over from QuickBooks and began our journey with CenterPoint in January of 2015. We now have four complete years of data in CenterPoint and are very pleased. There has been a lot of learning to do along the way, some of it was by learning the hard way (from experience), but it has been a very good move for us. Some of the features I like best about CenterPoint is that now all our companies are in one database and I have one standard chart of accounts and don’t have to bounce back and forth between multiple databases each time I need to access information in a certain company. I love being able to easily and quickly run financial (and any other) reports for an individual company, a few selected companies, or for the combined group as a whole. The distributions feature in CenterPoint is amazing and saves a lot of time by being able to determine what percentages of an expense I want to go to which crops and/or fields one time, and then use that distribution easily and often in multiple transactions. Another nice feature is that we have been able to use the fixed asset module to track our repair expenses by each piece of equipment. We still have a lot to learn about the program, but it has served us well and we look forward to the other areas where we can save time and perform better record keeping with some of the other features in CenterPoint. One last point I would like to make is that Red Wing Software’s Customer Service has been incredible - the best I have ever dealt with from a software company. First of all, they answer the phone quickly. Then they speak to me in English that I can understand and quickly resolve the issue at hand. If there ever is an issue that takes a while to resolve, they research it and then get back to me with an answer. Very Impressive. Now, everything has not been perfect as far as how the software has performed or the way in which we had to go through some of the processes to get the information we were looking for, but CenterPoint has helped us through those challenges. Often it was just our own operator error or misunderstanding. The bottom line is that CenterPoint Accounting for Agriculture is a very robust product, the best I have seen for small businesses in the agricultural industry. And the price was very reasonable as well. Taking all this into account, I don’t believe there is another product out there that comes close to providing that kind of value.”

Regards,

A Very Pleased Customer:

Sam Garner, CFO
Circle D Farms
 

For more customer stories, please  visit this link: CenterPoint Accounting for Agriculture Customer Stories.

Red Wing Software, Inc., along with its nationwide network of business partners, offers industry-leading service, as well as training, on-site installation and implementation of the software. Their vision is “Creating the best management software experience”. To learn more about the product and sign up for a demo, please visit: CenterPoint Accounting for Agriculture. Contact Red Wing Software at [email protected] or 800-732-9464.

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