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Building a Balance Sheet

This simple balance sheet program can generate financial statements.

Mike Wilson, Senior Executive Editor

February 5, 2016

1 Min Read

This Simple Balance Sheet program, provided by the Ag Economics department at University of Illinois, will easily generate financial statements for a two-year period. This program generates a balance sheet, income statement, statement of cash flows, as well as reporting the user's financial ratios.

The Balance Sheet program consists of two tools: The first allows the user to assemble complete balance sheets, database them, do single year ratio analysis and examine ratios over time. The second part of the tool allows the user to enter just the data used for the ratio analysis, database the information, and perform ratio analysis.

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You'll need Microsoft Excel version 2007 or higher to use the spreadsheet.

This is one of several FAST (Farm Analysis Solution Tools) found at the U. of I.'s FarmDoc website (farmdoc.illinois.edu/index.html), all available for download.  These spreadsheets are designed to help farmers make better financial and management decisions.

We're featuring the spreadsheet as our Farm Futures Financial Tool-of-the-month. Download it using the link below.

Do you have a spreadsheet that's made a difference on your operation that you'd be willing to share with other readers? Drop us a line at [email protected] with a description of the spreadsheet. We'll pay $100 if we feature your farmer-written noncommercial program as our Financial Tool of the Month.

To celebrate Farm Futures' ten-year anniversary, we're opening up the archives of our online Spreadsheet of the Month files. Just go to FarmFutures.com/spreadsheetarchive and enjoy.

About the Author(s)

Mike Wilson

Senior Executive Editor, Farm Progress

Mike Wilson is the senior executive editor for Farm Progress. He grew up on a grain and livestock farm in Ogle County, Ill., and earned a bachelor's degree in agricultural journalism from the University of Illinois. He was twice named Writer of the Year by the American Agricultural Editors’ Association and is a past president of the organization. He is also past president of the International Federation of Agricultural Journalists, a global association of communicators specializing in agriculture. He has covered agriculture in 35 countries.

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