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The FINPACK FAQ—you have questions, we have solutions. What is the current release of FINPACK? Is FINPACK compatible with Windows Vista? How do I copy a file from a floppy to my hard drive or network default data location? How do I copy a file from my hard drive to a floppy disk? Can I use information from my historic database to build my budgets? How can I delete an individual budget? (i.e. I no longer need a budget for corn silage) What does the discrepancy on the liability of FINLRB represent? How do you correctly enter a CCC loan on FINAN?
What is the current release of FINPACK? FINPACK Release 4.31 dated January 2, 2008, is the current release. Is FINPACK compatible with Windows Vista? Yes but with one qualification. FINPACK's internal help is
a WinHelp system, the engine for which is not included in Windows
Vista. Microsoft makes the engine available as a download at: How do I copy a file from a floppy to my hard drive or network default data location? Do not open a file, start from a blank FINPACK screen. Click File + Copy. Click Browse next to the top line for A:\ Single click to highlight the file you wish to copy. Click Open and OK. How do I copy a file from my hard drive to a floppy disk? Open the file you wish to copy to the navigator box. Then, select File + Copy from the menu bar. Click OK. Can I use information from my historic database to build my budgets? Yes you can. Simply pick the crop or livestock you want to budget for, then click Edit + Paste Historic Data from the menu-bar. You can also use this to assist in filling out the related operating expense sections of FINLRB and FINFLO. How can I delete an individual budget? (i.e. I no longer need a budget for corn silage) While on the budget screen, click Edit + Delete Budget from the menu-bar. This will work in some instances. Unfortunately, once a set of budgets has been saved and tied to a FINFLO or FINLRB you can no longer use this method to delete individual budgets. If your set of budgets is tied to a plan, you have two options. First, let the budget continue to reside in the budgets set and just not use it in your plans. Second, if you're into esthetics and really want to delete it, you can copy the entire set of budgets to a new name. Do this by: From the main tabs menu, highlight the Budgets you wish to copy with a single click. Then select New + Start with a copy of. The new set of Budgets is, at that point, not assigned to a plan, so you can go in and delete any individual budget you wish using the procedures outlined above. You can then go into the general information screen of you plans (screen #1) and switch the assignment of the Budgets to the new and improved set of budgets. What does the discrepancy on the liability of FINLRB represent? A requirement of FINLRB is that all capital purchases and capital sales must be assigned to something, either a cash account or a liability. As an example, if you were to buy additional acres as an alternative, you would need to indicate how that purchase was being financed. In most instances, you would go down to the liability page and either use an existing loan or a new loan as the source of funding. The most convenient way to do this is to highlight the principal balance of the loan that is the source of funds and click Detail. This detail box can be used for a number of things that will prevent discrepancies, i.e. capital purchases, capital sales, refinancing, etc... If a capital purchase is assumed to be financed by available cash, you must do a capital sale for the cash account and indicate a reduction in the asset value of the cash account. In my FINFLO output, why is most of the feed for my livestock usage going into the first month of the plan? The livestock budgets for finishing enterprises require a month on farm entry in order for everything to flow into the FINFLO smoothly. Typically, if this item is omitted, the first thing you'll notice is too much feed being used in the first month of the FINFLO. Check the livestock budgets. The months on farm should be reflective of the time the animal comes on board until the day it goes to market. For my dairy plan in the livestock section of FINFLO, how does the program use the cows on hand' and the cows milking' for projecting monthly production figures? For production purposes, FINFLO's dairy plan interacts with the data bank dairy budget to calculate total production. So, first of all, FINFLO looks at the "cows on hand" entries for all the months of your plan. It then calculates an average number of cows on hand throughout the planning period. FINFLO then makes the logical assumption that, because the dairy budget is based on a 12 month production cycle, all of these "average number of cows" will be lactating during a one year planning period. Total production for a year then is "average number of cows" times your data bank budget production figure (i.e. if your average number of cows is 55 and you have set production at 18,500, then you will project total production of 1,017,500 lbs of milk during a 12 month planning period). The "cows milking" for each month are then used as distribution factors to prorate the total production to each month. This is done by adding the "cows milking" numbers for all the months and dividing each month's number by this total. This number is then multiplied by the total production to arrive at a monthly production figure. Why, when I project the refinancing of debt in FINFLO, does my Term Debt Coverage ratio drop even though I'm not acquiring additional debt? The Capital Replacement Margin also was negatively affected. This was due to the large principal and interest payments required to pay down the term loans that were being refinanced. The same problem existed when you applied the proceeds from capital sales to pay down a loan. To fix this, we added a field in Detail on the Loan Payments page. Simply highlight P & I Payment for the loan that is being paid down and then click Detail. You will then be able to enter how much of the loan payment is the result of a refinance or a capital sale. Those amounts are subtracted from the term debt coverage ratio calculation. How do you correctly enter a CCC loan on FINAN? Click here for a White Paper on how to correctly enter CCC loan transactions in FINAN. When inputting inventories, sales, etc. in FINAN livestock enterprise analysis, how can I grab the information from the balance sheets or previous whole farm entries? It would be nice to only enter these items once. Use Detail to make your entries. You'll notice a colorful item in the detail tool bar that allows you to link to previous entries in the Balance Sheets or the livestock sales/cull sales section of FINAN. Tag the entries you wish to include in the enterprise input, and they're automatically inserted. |
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