From ¼ of an acre to 10
In 2018, Doug Sheats, along with his wife, brother, and cousins, started a roadside veggie stand on his family’s seventh-generation row crop farm. The stand was powered by a modest ¼ of an acre to start, but it quickly expanded to 10 acres, growing large enough to supply famer’s markets, restaurants, and grocery stores with local produce. As his operation grew, Doug found that his bookkeeping practices were no longer keeping up with his business. He had relied on recording income and expenses on a spreadsheet, but with an increase in volume, he found he wasn’t able to maintain his books despite spending an hour bookkeeping each day. Doug was in need of a bookkeeping solution that would shrink his menial tasks, empowering him to spend more time building his business.
“I kept feeling like I was wasting time doing repetitive book work, time that could have been spent on other things that really needed doing. And then, bang, I found Ambrook. It was exactly what I was looking for! Made for farming and made for doing things faster.”
Saving time on Ambrook
Now on Ambrook, Doug spends less than 25% of the time he used to spend bookkeeping and he says it is “100 times” more organized. Upon joining Ambrook, Doug’s onboarding specialist, Maika, helped him and Brianna set up rules that tag common transactions automatically. During the month of March 2023, more than half of the transactions in S&S’s ledger were categorized by automations, eliminating busy-work for Doug and his team.
Create rules that auomatically tag transactions for you.
Another avenue for time savings has been receipt capture. Before Ambrook, Doug had a stack of receipts in his farm truck that he’d sort through on a weekly basis. Today, Doug takes a photo of his receipt at the moment of purchase with his phone and is able to connect it to a transaction in the ledger immediately as his bank data syncs in real-time. The combination of these features has given Doug valuable time back and increased the accuracy of his bookkeeping.
Store all your receipts in Ambrook using receipt capture.
And those time savings have translated into Doug and Brianna now having more time to focus on the management side of their business, which is easier with a Chart of Accounts that represents their operation. Maika and Atticus, two members of the Ambrook team, helped Doug and Brianna transform their initial income and expense spreadsheet into a Chart of Accounts that matches the way they view their business while also rolling up to Schedule F. That same set of accounts is now S&S’s common language for their entire business: powering budgets, analytics, and reports so Doug and Brianna are ready to do even more powerful things on Ambrook as they scale.