Keeping farm receipts organized is not as much fun as digging a hole in the ground, but it’s still necessary. As a farmer myself, deep into tax season I find myself wishing for a better system to track business expenses. Enter FarmRaise Tracks. This new app is designed to help farmers with record keeping, and allows for categorizing expenses the same way they are reported on Schedule F. (Schedule F — Form 1040 — is used to report farm income and expenses.)

The app allows one to quickly capture and summarize expenses by category and date so you can monitor your expenses for taxes or other business use. All your information can be downloaded to a .csv file (spreadsheet format).

At our family farm, Little Farm Black Mountain, we’re making early season purchases of seeds, soil amendments, and tools, so I tried to log some of these expenses into FarmRaise Tracks. It’s a pretty intuitive user interface, where you can (+) Add Expenses, and enter the vendor, price, and category. You can also assign the expense to a specific enterprise, such as buying biodegradable cow-manure based pots and charging it to the “Seedling Sales” piece of your business. One receipt can also be split among categories, such as if you’re buying both seeds and tools from a vendor like Johnny’s.

You can take photos of receipts to attach it to the expense, which works easily. There is also the option to upload a file with a receipt in it, say if you save an email receipt to PDF and want to upload the file. This function did not work for me, however. The app is still in Beta testing. Another downside is that if you decide you need a different photo of the receipt, you can’t edit it once you have saved the expense.

FarmRaise Tracks can be accessed online at FarmRaise Tracks or on the App Store or the Play Store for a fee of $40 per month.

Mary Saunders Bulan was RAFI-USA’s Farmer Services Director.