Help needed for small/medium size distributor in book keeping

Farm Questions
1

hi Farmnest,

I am a small/medium size rice distributor in Karnataka. So far I have been doing all the bookkeeping (like managing inventory, accounting, customer details) by hand in a book.
I would like to know what techniques or methods do other distributors like me use to do all the book keeping? Is there a better way to maintain all the things I have mentioned.

Thanks
Govinda

2

There are a number of commercial accounting and inventory applications in the market for all sizes of business - Tally, quickbooks etc.

There are some opensource/free alternatives as well but you will still need someone to manage the installs and the maintenance, unless you have the technical exposure to manage that yourself. Some of the opensource options I can think of are gnucash (desktop accounting, no inventory), frontaccounting/phreebooks (web based accounting with some inventory management), OpenERP, OpenBravo, Compierie (full ERP suites) etc.

There are also some software as service type options, but whichever you choose you need an accountant to manage the setup and entries.

3

Hi Govinda,

A simple excel sheet would do the job.

For someone who can blog, managing excel should’nt be a trouble after all!

If you are looking at complex auditing incl final accounts etc I would recommend Tally as its specifically tailored made for Indian business environment.

Regards,

4

Mr Chandra ,has rightly said any of software like Tally can solve your problems,it will take only few hours of learning.The best way to take out only 30 minutes for this job and no need of any body’s help and all will be at your tips.
g c jagwani

5

A lot of farmers that we’ve talked with either use Excel or Quickbooks. However these days some farm management software systems also incorporate bookkeeping or accounting features. The advantage of an integrated solution is that you can more easily look at profit and loss information at a field, crop or animal level. Additionally farm specific bookkeeping software can make it easier come tax time by helping to pull together your accounting information into a form that’s easy to translate into a Schedule F for the IRS.

If you’re interested in an integrated farm record keeping and bookkeeping system, I hope you’ll check out Farmbrite.

Disclaimer: I founded Farmbrite