CHAPTER XV. 



BOOK-KEEPING FOR FARMERS. 



THE NECESSITY OF KEEPING ACCOUNTS CORRECTLY. 



(BY J. BUCKLEY, Accountant to the Bureau of Agriculture.) 



(Introduction by the Editor.} 



Farming is as much a business as selling tea and sugar or dry 

 goods, or banking, or any other commercial pursuit, and it is quite 

 as necessary that the farmer should keep proper books of accounts 

 as the dry goods merchant, the storekeeper, the banker, or any 

 other commercial man. The farmer buys, sells, and makes profits 

 and losses during the year, and it is absolutely necessary for the 

 proper conduct of his business that he should know what profit or 

 loss he has made at the end of the twelve months, and, more 

 particularly on what lines he is losing money, and on what he is 

 gaining. The average farmer is not fond of the pen, and is not a 

 ready reckoner, as a rule. This is all the more reason why he 

 should keep books of account so as to be a check upon his memory, 

 in which storehouse farmers are too apt to insecurely lock away the 

 ill-calculated results of their monetary transactions. I do not 

 suppose that more than 15 per cent, of the farmers of Australia keep 

 any kind of account books at all, and perhaps not more than rive per 

 cent, keep them properly and can tell, after a glance at their books, 

 how they stand, ho\v much profit they made last year, and the chief 

 lines on which these profits were made. On frequent occasions I 

 have been selected as a judge of farms in competitions for the best 

 managed farms in certain localities. I have, in the scale, always 

 allotted a certain number of points to book-keeping, but my 

 experience has shown that the full measure of these points has 

 never yet been awarded, and frequently that the farmer who owned 

 the best managed farm kept no books at all, or anything worthy of 

 calling books of account. I remember asking one of the best and 

 most practical farmers of an eastern colony why he did not keep a 

 proper set of books, and he replied, " Oh, the bank does that for me. 

 When I've got money in the bank I'm all right, and when I haven't 

 I'm all right too, because they lend me some." Asked how he kept 

 a check upon the bank, he said the bank was honest enough. But 

 while the bank maybe honest enough the want of system in not 

 keeping books is all wrong. It would never do for the merchant to 

 go on in this haphazard way, and it is not right for the farmer to 

 do so. 



