This spring, while farmers have been charting their course through chaotic weather to harvest and plant, we have been putting finishing touches on many years of work to bring new business Learning Centers online. We know many established farmers won’t find time for these resources until after Thanksgiving, but we are excited to get them launched for those who are in early planning stages and for business advisers.
California FarmLink’s new interrelated multimedia Learning Centers contain beginning , intermediate, and advanced materials ranging from short definitions to detailed workbooks. These written and audio-visual guides focus on applied understanding and implementation. The Learning Centers are designed for farmers, ranchers and fishers, as well as for bookkeepers, tax preparers, and accountants who help agricultural and fishing businesses adopt good business and financial management practices.
Learning and business development are not linear, so these learning centers are not designed with a clear beginning and end. You can enter wherever your need or curiosity takes you, and navigate to other resources as you choose. In the coming weeks we will share additional updates on our blog, introducing each of the learning centers in more detail.
Our next blog post will focus on the Business Basics and Business Planning Learning Centers, which are the best places to start if you have recently begun your business.
We are particularly excited about our new Bookkeeping Learning Center, because it was built for people who are well down the road of running a business and now realize that they need to make fundamental changes to how they keep their books. We got you! The Bookkeeping Learning Center is a short course on farm bookkeeping and includes model charts of accounts you can use as a guide to restructure your current books, or you can download and upload into Quickbooks Online if you want a fresh start. We highly recommend a fresh start! You will also find videos with step-by-step instructions for how to get started and how to maintain your books going forward.
The Income Tax Learning Center has something for everyone. It starts with essential information for new business owners and continues through intermediate and advanced topics related to agricultural taxation. You will find videos, written resources, and a Farm Tax Organizer designed to help you organize information from prior years if you need to - or decide to - file past due tax returns. How common is it for people to need to or decide to file past tax returns? So common we created a whole workbook to help you do it. We don’t care where you have been, we just want to help you establish a financial foundation for long-term peace and wellbeing.
Explore any or all six of the Learning Centers here. This article is also the first in a series of blog posts about this work. Stay tuned for more.
