📋 Before you start
What this section is for, and what it isn't.
Finances tracks farm money against the things it was spent on. It isn't accounting software, it won't do your GST, and it doesn't connect to your bank. What it does is answer a question your accounting software can't: which part of this block makes money and which part quietly eats it?
💡 Allocation is the whole point
A pile of receipts tells you what the farm cost. Costs allocated to a herd, animal, flock or paddock tell you what the sheep cost versus the hens versus the horse. That's the difference between bookkeeping and knowing your block, and it takes about three extra seconds per record.
1️⃣ Logging a transaction
Expenses and income, same form.
Use + Expense or + Sale / Income on the Finances card, or the equivalents in the quick-capture row on Today's Brief. The fields:
- Date and amount.
- Category — what kind of spend or income it is.
- Supplier / buyer and invoice number — optional, but they're what make a record findable in two years when someone queries it.
- Discount — optional.
- Applies to — the important one. See below.
- Notes.
Applies to
Six options, and picking the right one is what makes the reporting work:
- Whole farm — rates, fencing, general costs that aren't attributable.
- Herd / group — drench for the ewes, hay for the cattle.
- Individual animal — a vet call for one cow, or the sale of one animal.
- Poultry flock — feeds straight into your cost-per-egg figure.
- Paddock — fertiliser, spray, regrassing.
- Equipment — a repair or a service, linked to the item in your register.
Default to Whole farm when you genuinely can't split something. Don't force an allocation that isn't real — a wrong one is worse than none.
2️⃣ Invoices with several lines
One bill, several parts of the farm.
A rural supplies invoice is rarely one thing. New invoice lets you enter the supplier, invoice number and date once, then add a line per item — each line allocated to its own part of the farm, with a running total.
So one $840 invoice can be drench against the ewes, layer pellets against the flock, and a roll of wire against the whole farm, without pretending it was all one cost.
3️⃣ The feed store
Feed is the biggest running cost on most blocks.
🌾 Feed store on the Finances card tracks feed as stock, not just as spending. Log a purchase — date, feed, bags, bag size and total cost — and optionally have it post the expense to Finances at the same time, so you're not entering it twice.
Then knock bags off as you use them. The card shows bags on hand, your last price per bag, and flags a feed as running low before you find out by opening an empty bin.
4️⃣ What's making money
The report the allocations were for.
The 📊 What's making money figure on the Finances card opens a breakdown of income minus costs for each part of the farm you've been allocating to — by year or all time.
Expect it to be uncomfortable reading the first time, and expect it to be more useful than any budget. It's the difference between "the farm cost a bit this year" and "the sheep washed their face, the hens are marginal, and the horse is a hobby" — which is fine, as long as you know it.
💡 It only reflects what you allocated
Anything logged as Whole farm sits outside the per-enterprise comparison, because it can't fairly be split. If most of your spending is landing there, the report will look thin — that's a prompt to allocate more finely, not a fault in the numbers.
5️⃣ Where else money appears
Finances collects from the rest of the app.
Several actions elsewhere post money here so you don't double-enter:
- Poultry sales and flock costs from the Flocks section.
- Animal sales recorded through Record exit, and harvest values from home-kill.
- Equipment servicing, if you tick the box to log the cost as an expense.
- Feed purchases from the feed store.
There's also All transactions — a flat table of everything by date, type, category and amount, which is the fastest way to find one record or check you haven't entered something twice.
✅ What the app does vs what you do
The honest split.
My Block Hand handles: dated income and expense records with categories and suppliers; allocation to herd, animal, flock, paddock or equipment; multi-line invoices; feed stock and reorder flags; per-enterprise profit reporting; and collecting money posted from other sections.
You still have to: enter the transactions; decide the right allocation; and take anything tax-related to your accountant. This is a management tool, not a tax return.
This guide describes My Block Hand as at July 2026. Nothing here is accounting or tax advice — talk to your accountant about your own situation.