Dairy Alliance

Reports are important in data interpretation. However, it is necessary to integrate the data from various reports to provide deeper insight as to how a business is performing. Informatio from a balance sheet and an income statement must be integrated to calculate return on assets or return on equity. Production data must be integrated with financial data to calculate the cost of production per unit of output. Although an income statement may point out that a business is losing money, we cannot necessarily determine why that is happening unless we review production records. Through the integration of production and financial records we can perform enterprise analyses. We can only accomplish managerial cost accounting or evaluate the labor efficiency of our operations by integrating data from various information sources.

On a larger scale, we must integrate data from our business with data from other businesses. In doing so, we can compare the performance of our business in different areas to industry standards or benchmarks.

Articles:

Using Milking Center Information with Key Benchmarks

If producers employed the managerial cost accounting practices utilized in corporate America, the milking center would be considered a cost center. In a dairy business the milking herd is the main, and sometimes the only, profit center.

The Cost of Harvesting Forage

Information gathered for dairy enterprise analysis may not be inadequate to provide sufficient detail on the various functions involved in raising the forages. Managerial accounting can provide the information needed to examine the efficiency of different functions within a business. One example is determining the cost of harvesting a ton of forage.