Excel spreadsheet for tracking expenses and income from chickens

[PostCarbonPioneer]

I've been using your Chicken Tracker for over 3 years and didn't know til now that you were updating it yearly. Always got it from your website page Chicken Tools, but now I see it's no longer alive, so I went looking for it and found this thread. WOW! Updating yearly ! What a service to the community!

One thing I could use, and this is asking a lot: I like to track my two different coops, to see how they are doing. Still count the feed together--so Pounds per Feed and Feed Cost Per egg calculations stay the same...but keeping the # of chicken and the # of eggs separate is useful info. Then combine to a total......

Just an idea, no pressure.....

Thanks SO much for this great tracker! It really impresses my husband that I can tell him precisely how much feed each egg takes, and therefore how much each egg costs us, by month....

PCP

 

[arkwelded]

I wouldn't even consider tracking it. mine looks like I spend tons of cash and give away the eggs. lol
but our kids are all but out of the house and we do love our girls.

 

[raizin]

The 2015 version of Steve's Chicken Tracker is available for download. Both Excel and Google Sheets versions are ready and waiting for your downloading pleasure. The links are in my community profile. Enjoy. ~Raisin

 

[georgejlee]

That's a really nice Excel spreadsheet, I can tell you put a lot of work into it! Reading this thread and others inspired me to create something more powerful than a spreadsheet. I've had a lot of experience developing web and mobile apps and decided to put in the effort to develop a better solution. I developed a service for easily tracking egg production, feed consumption, sales, and more. It can provide recommendations for ways to improve your egg production or reduce your expenses based on the data you provide. Please take a look at the web site in my profile and let me know what you think or if there are other features you'd like to see. I'm giving a free 30-day trial of the Flock Manager to BackyardChickens.com members who sign up for my newsletter at the bottom of my web site. Thanks!

 

[raizin]

That sounds great, but my small flock has more than 10 birds and typically makes less than $240 a year, so a subscription to your service would put me in the hole and defeat the purpose. I'll stick to my wife's free spreadsheet.

 

[Betsy57]

I've been using your Chicken Tracker for over 3 years and didn't know til now that you were updating it yearly. Always got it from your website page Chicken Tools, but now I see it's no longer alive, so I went looking for it and found this thread. WOW! Updating yearly ! What a service to the community!

One thing I could use, and this is asking a lot: I like to track my two different coops, to see how they are doing. Still count the feed together--so Pounds per Feed and Feed Cost Per egg calculations stay the same...but keeping the # of chicken and the # of eggs separate is useful info. Then combine to a total......

Just an idea, no pressure.....

Thanks SO much for this great tracker! It really impresses my husband that I can tell him precisely how much feed each egg takes, and therefore how much each egg costs us, by month....

PCP

I have two separate coops so I use two separate spread sheets. I try to loosely keep expenses separate then I add them together for final numbers. Close enough for me.

2014 Egg Lady numbers are in. The gals laid 8926 eggs (doesn't count the duck eggs) and they went through nearly 2 tons of feed! #3820 lbs. I try to break even just counting feed expenses and then of course, never cover all other expenses nor paid for all my labor. Lots of work for this old gal! But overall, a fun and rewarding hobby.

 

[georgejlee]

Thanks for the feedback, I appreciate it. My goal is to provide much more than $240/year of value by helping you find ways to save money, increase production, and keep track of your customers and sales. That said, I'll look into developing a lower cost option for people with simpler needs.

 

[Heron's Nest Farm]

I have begun inputting for this year in the 2015 spread sheet you provided.

THANK YOU!

I can't express ENOUGH my jubilation in possessing this tool. It is amazing watching the calculations come up at the bottom of each page. I really needed JUST this to really track what's happening on our farm with the chicken businesses we are starting up.

Again, thank you. Tell your wife she is a genius!

 

[raizin]

You are welcome. I found one small calculation problem that I had not hit before. We did not open a new bag of feed one month. This throws off the calculation for the year and month. I will get it fixed eventually, but my wife is sick in bed and it may take a couple of months. So to avoid this problem. claim one penny cost and one pound of food fed in any month you don't actually open a bag of feed. You can always just take a bag from a different month and put it in the empty month. This will make the calculations come out close to accurate. lol. I will get it fixed eventually. I had never had a month before where I did not claim at least one bag of food. I went through 1500# of chicken food last year, hard to believe I had a month with no feed used. If you go to my profile you will see my blog link and I just posted my 2014 financial chicken results if you are interested in a baseline. I did much better this year. My best year ever.

 

[georgejlee]

Congrats! I never quite got to selling my eggs, my family gobbles them up too fast. At the peak we had 8 laying hens producing ~6 eggs per day, but between myself, my wife, my daughter, and various visiting relatives, I never had a surplus of more than a dozen or so. $4 per dozen sounds very cheap to me, around here (SF bay area) organic pastured eggs go for $7-9 a dozen. Do you use regular feed or organic feed? I wonder if people will pay more for organic eggs?

I've decided to work on a free version of my chicken management software, I realize now that for people keeping small backyard flocks it doesn't make sense to charge a lot of money for this kind of service. I'm planning to do something similar to the spreadsheet, but backed by a database and with a nice interface for viewing and managing your data. Would anyone be interested in a mobile app (e.g. iPhone or Android app) for this as well? Are there things you want to be able to do but can't do right now due to the limitations of Excel?