Enterprise Budgeting

An enterprise budget is a complete, per-unit projection of the revenues and costs of a single farm enterprise — a crop per hectare, a class of livestock per head — that, unlike a gross margin, accounts for both variable and fixed costs to arrive at net return and the full cost of production. Standard in farm management texts such as Kay, Edwards, and Duffy and Boehlje and Eidman, enterprise budgeting forces every claim on the enterprise's resources to be priced: not just seed and fertiliser, but depreciation, interest, land charge, and overhead. The headline outputs are net return per unit and the unit cost of production, the break-even price and yield that tell a manager what it really takes for the enterprise to pay its way.