Eric Jasinski
Appearances
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
I've onboard a lot of customers. That's one of the things I do. And I've sort of a lot of that conversation at the beginning is like, what are you doing today? What are we bringing over? Sort of what'd you do in the past? And I think a lot of folks use QuickBooks or whatever it is because they know that they should be doing something, right? And they've used it.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
And like I sort of say that as somebody who likes doing this stuff. And so, you know, I get it. Don't don't don't get too mad. But at the same time, like that is sort of the if we're really doing our job right, that's what's happening.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
Yeah, well, as you might imagine, some of that has to do with the time of year. And so if somebody, it's that time of year, you got a year's worth of books to catch up on and you're ready to commit to the system, it looks a little bit more
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
like Corey's what we're going to focus on is getting transactions in and sort of backfilling and getting the chart of accounts set up, but all that stuff standard. So, you know, fast forward, let's pretend it's January and you were ready to close up books in one place. And I just like start fresh.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
Um, a lot of the things we would focus on a lot of the same things as far as categories and enterprises, which I'm happy to talk about that, um, a little bit more, but like, uh, and it's a conversation about what is your business? What do you care about? Like in an ideal world, what are you tracking? Um, And maybe your answer is just taxes, but maybe it's not.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
Or maybe it's like, I just do taxes today, but I actually want to know field profitability tomorrow or something like that. And so that's kind of like, I think the big difference, it's all about how you get started, right?
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
And so if you get started with a structure that's going to work for you and you can buy into, then you put in that work over a year and you're going to come out the other side feeling Feeling better and having analytics that maybe you didn't even think you'd be able to get if somebody hadn't talked to you about it and sort of like showing you the end state before you get there.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
So honestly, it's a conversation we say, you know, how do you make money? Like, where do you sell? Are you invoicing? Is it all checks? Do you have prepaid stuff? Like, what does that balance sheet side look like? And just like really peeling back the onion and trying to figure out where the opportunities are to give you insights that that you didn't have.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
And I say that with the caveat that you can just be like income, expense, tax done. And that's that's also a totally accessible solution.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
Yeah. I mean, well, two things come to mind. I think like, like you're talking about, um, within a farm, it's like, you know, I'm row cropping, I have this extra equipment, I'm going to do some custom work and I want to be able to say, all right, like how much is my farm making? Like, I know I can cashflow all these other ways, but I want to know like, what is the actual farm product origin?
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
And so, you know, that's one way to think about it. I do think like something that you just said that reminded me of it, like, We onboard a ton of farms. We get to know them and talk about their stuff and then like find out, oh, wait, you're a farm, but you are a trucking company or you are a hospitality company or something like that. Right.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
And then, you know, that's the nice thing is like so we have categories, categories of what we call incomes and expenses in Ambrook. And so, yeah, I'll get you set up with cold cow sales, red cow sales, elevator sales, whatever it may be.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
And then if you want to go have rentals, property income and property insurance and property taxes as categories, like we're not quite so one dimensional that we can't figure out what some good categories might be. I think that's like the nice thing about building bookkeeping software is like this is. this is like a law of physics type thing.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
Like it's going to apply to your other, your other situations. And so that's a lot of the category discovery process. And then, you know, like, like we talked about a little bit setting you up. So we got farm categories and we can map those to a schedule F. Right.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
And so a lot of folks may, and like, maybe, you know, Tanner, you probably know this, like when you're underwriting a loan or something, you'll say, Hey, let me get three years of your schedule up. And that's 32 boxes, whatever it may be. And there's a model and it can give you a credit score and do all that stuff. great, but that might not be enough for you.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
We're trying to fit square pegs into round holes here. With Ambrose, you can both run your business with the categories that you actually need, get that Schedule F box filled out, and something that you didn't see because it didn't come up is we do the same thing with Schedule C. It's like, I have a farm enterprise here. Here are my categories. Here's my Schedule F mapping.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
I run that rental business. Here's my Schedule C mapping. So on and so forth. That's what we do today because those are the biggest overlaps that we see in the market right now, but The foundation's there. It's easy to imagine. Additional forms, additional mappings, and things like that.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
No, we do not do that. The way we think about it is if you think about maybe a typical meeting with the CPA or the way you're prepping for the year, maybe it's three meetings. Here's my shoebox. Okay, here, let me answer all these questions you have about my shoebox. Third meeting is like, okay, here's your filings.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
Maybe we can cut a meeting down or something and knock a little hours off the bill or something like that, save some back and forth. Just one of the ways we think about it.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
Yeah. So, um, what it doesn't mean is like, I'm not going to geofence it like Google maps sort of set it up that way, but, um, you have an enterprise tag. We talk about tags as different ways you might want to cut your data. And location is a thing that we support. And so you can tell us about your field, tell us how many acres it is. You can put an address in. We don't do anything with it.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
But maybe if you forget, you can just check Ambrook for your directions or something like that. But I think a lot of that comes back down to benchmarking too. So you can establish a field, you can tell us about a location, and you can allocate income to that field. You can Expense to that field to make it really easy to split like a utility bill or water bill across the field.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
And then the last thing you can do in addition to telling us acreage is tell us output. So you can be like field A, acres X, bushels Y or something like that. Right. And what that's going to do is get you a benchmark for. How many dollars do I have to spend to grow a bushel per acre I want to maintain? So then maybe you're thinking about leasing a new land or something like that.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
And you think about what's my carrying capacity? What can I afford? How much money do I have? What are my next steps? And so having the ability to say, this is my per acre, per location type of profitability is really the first step in starting to think about that decision.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
Yeah, I mean, no, totally. I think like, listen, if I could snap a finger and have every bank in the world do it, do an automatic sync, that would be great. And then a bunch of people would just be, you know, saving one step on the bookkeeping, I think, to your point, like with regards to the transaction port. and try to make that as seamless as possible.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
They've got a history with it, but that doesn't necessarily mean they have a good history with it, right?
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
And like, back to your other question, you know, call your bank, tell them you want to use Ambrook and we'll be happy to get on the phone with them and we'll, we'll work it out with their team directly. If we have to, like, we would be, we would be all the happier to do that.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
But, you know, obviously there's a lot of banks in the world and it's going to take a lot of phone calls to, to do something like that. So we do have the transaction import, which is good. If you, you know, do it once a month, there's, you can split the workload up and like, you got a whole year done in an hour. And so you can imagine maybe if that was, a smaller bite size thing.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
And then we have other ways that some folks like to, like to go about it. I think like the interesting thing when you're coming off of pen and paper is like, some folks are used to writing down in their checkbook, like check X for this purchase. Right.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
And like, if we can just change that habit and have your register be on Ambrook, you're getting the same input, but you're getting output that lasts and can be reviewed later. Or, you know, maybe you just want to snap a picture of a receipt and have a transaction generated from that receipt. You get two birds with one stone. And so yeah,
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
Yeah, I mean, listen, every bank in the world would be great. In the meantime, we're basically just trying to make sure that there are as many ways to get that data in and have that for reference later as we can think of.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
No, totally. I think like at the end of the day, like we don't make money from data. We make money from users having a good time. So like and like having a better experience analyzing their business. So, you know, your data is on Ambrook for your access and for your convenience. And you pay us money for us to provide a place where you can see that data.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
And, you know, we have we have a wallet product where we get yield if you hold a deposit with us and we share that yield back with you, by the way, if you use that product. So. We don't sell data because that's just not what we do. We're not in the business.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
We're sort of in the trust business, and we're in the help business, and we're not really in the benchmarking, selling stuff type of business. And we do actually work with a nonprofit called Ag Data Transparent who certifies our use of data every single year. We renew that, basically verifying exactly the concern you're talking about because, as you can obviously imagine...
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
A lot of farmers, this is probably top two things that come up whenever we speak to somebody.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
Totally. Yeah. No, I mean, we, we, we take that, that's genuinely like a responsibility that we take super seriously, you know, from end to end security all the way through privacy. Like that's, that is a hundred percent what we're built on.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
I mean, I will say one of the nice things about working in my capacity anyways is the support side. So you onboard a customer, you take them from dreading the process to actually enjoying the process. And then they keep you posted. I had a guy write in the other day to our customer support chat, basically saying, hey, I don't need anything. I just like this change you made to the menu.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
Like, thanks. Keep up the great work. It's just like a really, really rewarding message to get from somebody.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
Yeah. I mean, we, um, that's something we pride ourselves on and we have staff like myself that are fully dedicated to, to being around. Um, I, you know, I make the joke that, uh, there's, there's some bookkeeping help that goes on there. Sometimes people just want someone to say hi to like, you know, you got another human on the other end of the line. Um, but a lot of what, uh,
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
a lot of the things that help build habits, especially for six months, right. It's like, Hey, um, I know you told me how to do this thing on the onboarding call. I forgot, like, what do I do about this bill? How do I match this payment?
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
And I think like, without having just like that, knowing that you have that in your back pocket from a helpfulness perspective, like it would be much harder to build the habit and you might not, you might not. So like, that's definitely a part of the experience for us is like, we're in the empowerment business first and foremost.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
And like, honestly, you probably hear less from folks that have been on the platform for six, 12, 18 months. Cause they do have a life. And like at the end of the day, like I, you know, they don't really want to talk to me that bad, but for the six months that I got, it was a good time.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
Yeah. So the, one of the things like to your point about the bank, for example, right? Like some banks don't offer automatic sinking, but you have a bunch of card transactions. So what we decided was, all right, having a business cash account that you can use for things like receiving invoice payments or,
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
Paying your bills with ACHs or mail check, having a debit secured card that you use, or you have farmhands that you use, or maybe you just want to split out the personal from the from the business expenses. We basically have all of these banking-style services that we offer on Ambrook with the main goal of helping you keep everything consolidated.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
So it's like, say you send an invoice out and you receive a payment on that invoice. Today, that payment might hit your bank account. You got to find that thing in your bank account, find the invoice, sync it up. It adds steps. And if you don't do it over a couple of months, then you're trying to remember which payments go to which invoices.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
And next thing you know, you're double counting income or something like that, which obviously you don't want to do. And so if you do all of that on Ambrook, like the matching happens for you, the deposits get reconciled. And like it kind of, again, it's like reducing friction and making things feel better. And so that's why we offer those things.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
They're not mandatory to use, but basically like the longer you're with us, the more you find you're like, well, I'm already on here anyway. It's like, why would I not send a mail check through Ambrook? That doesn't, you know, that type of thing.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
Yeah. So Ambrook, as a headline, is base subscription fee. We have two tiers, $60 and $100 a month. So that's $1,200, $720 annual. You can get a 10% discount on both of those if you sign up for the year. So $50 I'm good at math. $54, $10.80 from a subscription fee. And that is basically all the fees that we make money from the customer.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
The other fee on the platform that is often discussed is the invoicing fee. And so you send an invoice, your customer pays you with an ACH or a card. There's a payment processing fee. There's 0.4% with a cap on ACH. There's credit card fees, etc., We pass those on to the customers. We do not keep those.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
And so some folks choose to pass them along, some folks for a convenience fee to their customers, stuff like that. And then no fees on the bill pay today and no fees for the cards whatsoever. Um, and so basically like, yeah, that, that's the whole structure.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
Yeah. Hey, my name is Eric Jasinski. I work here at Ambrook. We are a farm bookkeeping platform, financial management platform. And yeah, I work on the product team with our customers and I like highways. And I like highways.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
And then I guess on the opposite end of the spectrum, like I mentioned, um, for folks that are using Ambro to hold funds, uh, we have a 1% yield that we started rolling out actually last week. And so, you know, we, uh, basically it's like a cashback program for your deposits. You can think about it like, um, like a high yield checking account.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
So you get this sort of like 1% savings of a savings type account, but all the functionality of an operating account. And so we make yield on that, but we share it back to the customers.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
And I didn't know. Actually, it's funny you say that. The thing I haven't mentioned is we do have a mobile app. It's included for all the tiers of the product. And so you can send that invoice from the go. You can use it on sale. You don't need to be connected to Wi-Fi. And so that's something that we've got built out. And yeah, so being in the field is no excuse not to get your money.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
It's called Ambrook. Right now, we basically have it. There's this app called TestFlight, which is basically a sort of gating app that we use to only let Ambrook members download it. So you sign up for Ambrook, we send you a code, and you download it. It's available on the Android store, but Apple's got policies and things that it's just a little easier for us to keep a grab it through that.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
So I need to reply. But I'll send you a link because you are a freshly onboard customer, and so getting you onto that app is my job.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
We have one office of ours that is in Manhattan and that's where I'm sitting from. And then we have another office in Denver and then we've got some folks from
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, like most, I mean, a lot of farms have that mix. Like, honestly, when I get a customer and they're like, Hey, I have a separate business account. I'm like, all right, great. You can already start and that's easier. But it's kind of like I was talking about with trucking and hospitality. Like at the end of the day,
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
You know, your categories is an accounting software, first and foremost. Right. And so we have a bunch of things that may make farming easier and then a bunch of things that you can, you know, as creative as you want to get. You know, it's just like going to film school. You can you can get clever with your books and have your groceries, your medical, you know, your clothing budget, whatever.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
And basically you just put that in that part of the P&L that is below an operating income. it's there. It's part of the balance sheet, but your, your accountant will ignore it. It won't roll up to your schedule. Um, and, and you can feel good about that too. Yeah.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
california down to well the bottom of california um so other parts of california so when we talked earlier this week were you in denver no i was in california actually i was visiting some uh some colleagues up in uh san francisco yeah that looked not manhattan-ish wow no what gave it away the
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
But I, so you can, you can get that, you can get that rent expense. You get it every month and you can sit there and be like, all right, you know, August I spent 75% of my, my time at home, 75% deductible rent, 25% person rent. And you can make that, you can flex it however, however you see fit.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
Totally. Yeah. I mean, I think that like, I mean, I drove a little bit about how I want it to be fun and all that stuff. And I think that some of it is just like actually enjoying the habit, right? Some of it's like, it's also fun making more money, right? And it's fun growing and it's fun planning, like how are you going to get bigger? How are you going to sell more stuff?
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
How are you going to get that next plot? And you really can't do that stuff without taking this first step. And so like, you know, once you get that ball rolling, it's a dangerous game. All of a sudden you got expansion plans coming next year and it's a great problem to have.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
Yeah. So, I mean, you know, if you got your, one of the nice things about, about having, having data is like, you know, I've been seeing that all my Best Buy transactions are a personal expense. Like I want all those Best Buys to automatically get tagged, send and forget it. You know, same goes for like your utility bill or maybe your 76 bill or whatever it is.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
And there's just a number of things where, and you know, we have a button, it's the review button. So like you can filter that app to just see the stuff that you haven't tagged and set the automation up and that number is way lower and You're saving time. It's like, you know, we got those 45 transactions done in two minutes the other day.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
Yeah. I mean, I think that, um, I think the thing that I want people to, to, you know, keep in mind is, um, yeah, you may, you may think like, Oh, I'm a, I'm a family, I'm a family farm. Uh, and, and kind of whatever those expectations are about like what, what you should be doing or like what you can be doing. And I think like, um,
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
That was the sirens that we're missing. Ah, too quiet up there. Yes.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
you know, I've taken for me, I work with a lot of our livestock operators, um, just as an example. And like, it doesn't really matter how big you are. Livestock's not a simple business, right? You've got a multi-year asset cycle, your inventory is crossing fiscal years, you know, and, and to plan for those things, right? Like, when am I going to call my cows?
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
When am I going to keep the placement heifers? How does that interplay with the market? Um, A, you have the chance to take advantage of your situation if you know what to look for. And then that's the type of stuff that we're trying to focus on. And so I think just because maybe you don't have a big stack for whatever your mental model is, you run a complex business.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
And with that complexity, there's definitely opportunity. It's not easy. And we want to make sure you can take advantage of it.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
Yeah, I would say you can go to Ambrook.com. I think that probably we have a pricing page where you can see we have two tiers. That $60 tier I mentioned is basically just on invoicing. So if you don't do invoicing, that could be the right tier for you. If you do invoicing or you want to bring a whole team on, you're going to go to that higher tier package.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
And I would expect by the time this rolls out, we're going to have 30 day free trials available. And so hop on, get on the platform, get those, get those transactions in and see it for yourself. You know, it's one of those things I've talked to a lot of people that are thinking about it. And it's really hard to be just using the thing and testing it out.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
You know, the problem is that we're talking like five mile an hour with some traffic and some riffraff in front of us. That's why you could hear it.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
That's what I tell people. You'd be losing money if you didn't sign.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
Yeah. I mean, I think that, you know, the thing about working in ag for us anyways, is like, if you're really working in ag at large, you're kind of going to be a little bit of everywhere. And so sometimes it's actually more useful to be near an airport. So you can like get out to people, visit them.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
Likewise. Pleasure to meet you guys.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
Um, you know, we've got, uh, we've got folks down in Texas, we've got folks in California, we've got folks in Florida. Um, and we try as often as we can to get and visit them. And so, um, that's kind of like how I think about it anyways. Definitely, definitely makes some sense. Um, you know, before, before I was at Ambrook, I used to work in ag out in, um, California, um,
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
up near Palmdale, um, a little outside of LA. And so definitely spent some time, some time out there on the farm. But, um, yeah, these days I got folks back in New York and so I found myself, um, coming home, but just this way and, uh, feel fortunate to get to, you know, still stay in the, stay in the industry, but sort of spread, spread my wings.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
No, I was not a farm kid. I grew up outside of New York as well. And the way I got into ag was actually a little bit backwards. I used to work in finance, sort of like budgeting, forecasting, operations, spreadsheets in the cannabis industry, actually, starting in 2017. And so I did that for a while.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
And then basically what happened was I was making all these budgets for all these farms that we worked with and eventually I was like, damn, I got to figure out why we're, why we're not hitting the budgets that I'm making. And so I went out to the farm in California and, um, spent about three years working in a greenhouse out there.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
So going to the office day to day, I mean, it's not, you know, I say farm, maybe I'm being a little, a little charitable, but there's a greenhouse, there's water, there's nutrients. We're doing a lot of trimming and plant caretaking and stuff like that. And so, yeah, that's, that's how I got into it. And basically doing everything I do at Ambrook except for one operation back then.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
And a couple of years ago, I decided I wanted to do it for other farms too. And here we are.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
Yeah. I mean, you know, uh, I went to a school that, that has a film program is what I would say. And I think, uh, spent some time in the spreadsheets and then I found out there were these classes you could take to walk movies. And I signed up for those and turned out, turned out pretty good. And then they gave me a diploma and it said film on the bottom.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
Next thing you know, you went to film school. Um, and, uh, you know, I think that gets, uh, everyone likes movies, right? So it's been a blessing.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
We would have better quality. Three movies a week, and you're going to get a diploma sent to you in the mail.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
Yeah, so Ambrook makes software that is bookkeeping and accounting software specifically designed for farms or I guess the ag industry in general, so farms specifically. ranches, you know, veggie, CSA type operations, you name it. But basically trying to design something to help you track your expenses and look at your profitability at the sort of whole enterprise level.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
Ambrick started back in 2020, actually, right around COVID. Backstory was trying to help farmers get grants from the CFAP program during COVID and did a lot of that, facilitated probably, you know, upwards of $1,000 Grant applications for small farms trying to get by during that time. And then the sort of key takeaway there was that terms out applying for grants is actually a lot of paperwork and
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
Turns out that farmers hate paperwork and don't really want to pull together P&L and don't really have a balance sheet handy. And so sort of once that job was done, the next thing to do is really just build financial management software and sort of take a bottoms-up approach.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
So get your expenses, get your bills, get your invoices, get it all in one place, and then help you sort of figure it out and figure out what subscriptions you got, figure out how much supplies you're buying, and sort of make a plan from there.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
Yeah. I mean, I think I don't have the exact statistics next to me, but I think like you look at farming in America, it's majority small farms. Like the most, most folks are sort of under a certain size and under a certain revenue threshold.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
I think like within there, it could even be 50, 50, like saw pen paper or spreadsheets, which I kind of lump into one category or software, you know, quick books, zero quick in just to name drop a couple of folks that we definitely, you know, see, see folks, uh, transitioning over from.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
And then I think you do have, um, a lot of the sort of power law you got farms using, uh, net suite, um, you know, like granular maybe on the, on the row crap side and some of these more like enterprise solutions. Um, and I think the way that we think about it is, uh, I often think, honestly, I think about our competition is really spreadsheets.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
Sometimes the spreadsheets are good and they do a lot of things. And I think if you can make a software that sort of like can make you feel like you're using a spreadsheet in terms of approachability and like how dynamic it is and how like how customizable it is, that's a huge win for us.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
And then like Corey was saying, like, I think when you look at a farm, you know, most big farms secret is they probably start as a small farm. Right. And so like you got to start somewhere. you got to build a habit. Um, you got to have a track record and sort of as you're growing and thinking about growing, you want to have some source of truth that you're looking at. What did I do last year?
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
What were my ratios? You know, where am I losing money? Um, things like that. And so, yeah, I think like in general, we're, we're definitely seeing like a large percentage of farmers on a number basis or on like, be it that intro cookbooks program or be it that spreadsheet. Um, and those are the folks that are just trying to make, uh,
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
We're trying to make Forty have more fun when he does podcasts about bookkeeping.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
Yeah, I mean, I think that we... I've onboard a lot of customers. That's one of the things I do. And I've sort of a lot of that conversation at the beginning is like, what are you doing today? What are we, what are we, what are we bringing over sort of what'd you do in the past?
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
And I think a lot of folks use, use QuickBooks or whatever it is because they know that they should be doing something right. And they've used it. They've got, they've got a history with it, but that doesn't necessarily mean they have a good history with it. Right. Like they still have that, like that income is just sales and product income. Don't really know what product, right.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
don't really know how you sold it. And they've got five years worth of sales of product income. And so I think when, when folks come over to Ambrook, it is both a chance to use software that like build better habits and be almost like a chance to rethink what you've been doing in the past. Like maybe you've got experience like using QuickBooks quote unquote, right.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Financial Tools for Farms : Bookkeeping with Ambrook
But you haven't actually been like using it to improve your situation or better understand where you're at. And you're kind of like checking the box. And I think like a lot of our goals are to like, Turn the whole habit and turn the whole process into something that's relatable and something that is empowering and basically like something that hopefully you enjoy doing.