FINBIN is the premiere public farm financial database available for anyone to use. FINBIN users can generate reports to see the average results for a specific group of farms or to benchmark their farm directly against a peer group of farms. Comparisons can be made based on whole farm metrics or for specific crop and livestock enterprises. Either way FINBIN provides users a deeper understanding of the farm business.
You can create reports that are specific to your needs with just a few clicks!
Summary reports display the average results for the farms or enterprises you select. This type of report is an excellent guide to use when you are examining costs to produce a crop or even preparing a budget for your operation.
You can choose from three types of summary reports. Whole Farm reports look at the farm as a whole. Crop and Livestock reports summarize the costs and returns for a specific crop or livestock enterprise. Each type of report can be sorted or dissected in several ways, such as by farm size or farm type, and filters can be applied to include only farms of with specific characteristics.
To generate your own customized Summary Report, click on any of the three buttons in the Summary Report section and filter the data based on the options below.
Choose the type of Summary report that you want to examine. Under whole farm reports, you can choose from several report types such as a financial summary, income statements, balance sheets, profitability measures, or a report on household and personal expenses. For Crop or Livestock reports, simply choose the enterprise you wish to examine.
On whole farm reports, an advance enterprise sort is available to select farms that produced a specific livestock enterprise. This makes it possible to sort the whole farm data by livestock enterprise size. For example, this makes it possible to sort dairy farms by herd size.
Customize your report by filtering your report by a specific state, region, or county. FINBIN works with several states, allowing you to drill down to data specific to your area.
How would you like to sort the data? Select the way you want the data sorted by choosing the "Column Headings." Select Years for historical reports, then filter for the years to be included below. Select Profitability Group to compare high profit vs low profit farms. Or select Enterprise Size to compare farms of different size. The default setting is Years sorted in a descending order.
You can also choose to show a column for the average. This is on by default, but if you wish to turn this off, simply uncheck the "Show Avg Column."
Filters allow you to narrow your report to include only farms and ranches that fit your criteria. For example, if you are a 1,250 acre crop producer you may want to compare yourself to other crop farms of between 1,000 and 1,500 acres. Or maybe you want to compare yourself to only the most profitable farms. Filters allow you to quickly and easily customize your report. Special Sort filters allow you to include or exclude farms that have special attributes, such as organic farms or specialty crop farms.
Once you’ve customized your report, click on Generate Report to see your results.
We take data protection seriously. To protect producers who submit their data to the database we have set a minimum number of farms in order for a report to show results. For a report to show results, the minimum number of instances for any Whole Farm report is 10. The minimum for Crop and Livestock summary reports is 5 instances. If a column is missing from your report - that simply means that there wasn’t enough data for that criteria.
Benchmark reports are designed to help producers identify where they are performing better than other like producers and where they may be able to improve. Benchmark reports display the range of results for a specific peer group. For example, a corn report will break down the income and expenses corn production into percentiles. If you want to compare yourself to other farms similar to what you do, this is the report to use. Benchmark reports are more detailed than Summary reports, but most producers consider a Benchmark report to be more useful than a Summary report.
You can choose from three types of Benchmark reports. Whole Farm reports show benchmarks for various financial ratios. Crop and Livestock reports benchmark income and expenses specific to that enterprise.
To generate your own customized Benchmark Report, click on any of the three buttons in the Benchmark Report section and filter the data based on the options below.
Choose the type of Benchmark report you want to examine, or if you’re looking at a specific crop or livestock Benchmark Report simply choose the crop or livestock enterprise you wish to examine.
Customize your report by filtering your report by a specific state, region, or county. FINBIN works with several states, allowing you to drill down to data specific to your area.
You can narrow your report to include only farms and ranches that fit your criteria. For example, if you are a 1,250 acre crop producer you may want to compare yourself to other crop farms of between 1,000 and 1,500 acres. Or maybe you want to compare yourself to only the most profitable farms. Filters allow you to quickly and easily customize your report.
Once you’ve customized your report, click on Generate Report to see your results.
We take data protection seriously. To protect producers who submit their data to the database we have set a minimum number of farms in order for a report to show results. For a Benchmark Reports, we require a minimum of 30 instances.
A Benchmark report may look a bit funny when you first take a look at your customized Benchmark report. The median for the group is shown to the left along with the number of farms which submitted data for that row. The results are shown in percentiles, meaning that the numbers shown are the median for the farms in that percentile. Each line is sorted individually, so the weakest observations will be on the left and the strongest on the right, regardless of where any other observation falls. For example, if an operation spent $88 on seed corn, we might find that this operation falls in the 90th percentile meaning that they were lower cost than 90% of the farms included in that row. But that same operation could have spent $42/acre on chemicals for corn and fallen into the 30% percentile.
To use this report for yourself, take your value for each line and compare it to the numbers in the report. If you fall in a lower percentile for a given line, you may want to examine why that was. Was it something you couldn’t control and is normally better? Is there something that other operators are doing better?
The Compare Your Farm Financial Ratios report allows anyone, even those who did not contribute data to finbin, to compare their farm’s financial ratios to finbin. you might be familiar with the farm financial standards council which developed the “sweet sixteen” ratios. this report uses these ratios to compare your farm to farms included in finbin. once the report is generated your numbers will be highlighted to help you understand where you stand compared to a selected peer group of finbin farms.
When you first select this report type you can either choose to enter your farm’s financial ratios if you know them or you can choose to calculate the ratios if you don’t.
By selecting this option all you need to do is enter your farm’s financial ratios. If you use FINPACK to analyze your farm, you’ll find this information on the executive summary of the report.
Please note that none of the information you enter is stored. Once you’re done in FINBIN, you can be sure that no one will see your data.
Once you’ve finished entering your farm’s financial ratios, click continue to move on to the next step.
Selecting this option requires you to enter a small amount of financial data in order to calculate the Farm Financial Standards Council ratios. This data can be found in a couple of places. First, you’ll need your balance sheet and second you’ll need your most recent Schedule F tax form.
To the right of each data entry cell, you can click on the information button to display instructions for that specific item.
Please note that none of the information you enter is stored. Once you’re done in FINBIN, you can be sure that no one sees the data you entered.
Once you’ve finished entering your farm’s financial ratios, click continue to move on to the next step.
Customize your report by filtering your report by a specific state or region in a state. FINBIN works with several states, allowing you to drill down to data specific to your area.
You can narrow your report to include only farms and ranches that fit your criteria. For example, if you are a 1,250 acre crop producer you may want to compare yourself to other crop farms of between 1,000 and 1,500 acres. Or maybe you want to compare yourself to only the most profitable farms. Filters allow you to quickly and easily customize your report.
Once you’ve customized your report, click on Generate Report to see your results.
We take data protection seriously. To protect producers who submit their data to the database we have set a minimum number of farms in order for a report to show results. For a Compare Your Farm Benchmark report to show results, we require a minimum of 30 instances.
The "My Farm" column displays the ratios that you entered or were calculated based on the financial data that you entered. The second column is the group median, the midpoint for each measure of the peer benchmark group. In other words, half of the farms reported measures above this number and half were below.
The rest of the table shows, in percentiles, the range of results for each measure. The number listed is the median for the farms in that percentile. Each line is sorted individually, so the weakest observations will be on the left and the strongest on the right.
The results for your operation are highlighted in yellow. For example, if your operation falls in the 70th percentile for Current Ratio, then your operation has a stronger Current Ratio than 70% of the operations in the benchmark group. If your Debt-To-Asset ratio falls in the 40% range, then 60 % of the operations have a stronger solvency position than your farm.