Herd Budget Excel - Free Template

1. Open the Herd Budget sheet and enter your income and expense assumptions. Start with milk income, stock numbers, and the main cost lines you know will apply.
2. Check the Expense Lookup sheet first if you want a clean reference list for common herd costs. Use it to keep descriptions consistent across the workbook.
3. Move to the Budget Summary sheet and review the totals. This is where you check whether the planned margin leaves enough room for farm working expenses.
4. Use the Instructions sheet if you want a quick reminder of what goes where. It is handy when you return to the file after a few weeks away from it.
5. Update the figures whenever payout expectations, feed costs, or livestock costs change. A budget only stays useful if you keep it current.
6. Save a fresh copy each season so you can compare one year with the next. That makes it easier to spot where margin moved and why.

A sharemilker uses a herd budget to turn a season’s milk income and farm costs into a working plan. If you are budgeting for 280 cows at 420 kgMS per cow, you can quickly test whether the expected payout covers feed, grazing, animal health, and labour before the season locks in.

The Herd Budget sheet is the place for those inputs, while the Budget Summary sheet shows the end result. That is useful when you are sitting with a farm owner, banker, or accountant and need a clear answer on whether the numbers stack up.

Where this fits in the season

Most sharemilkers start this sort of budget before the milking season kicks off, then review it after payout updates or a feed decision. A 5% change in milk income on a $420,000 budget is $21,000, so even small moves matter.

Why the split sheets help

Keeping inputs separate from the summary makes the file easier to run month by month. If a grazing cost changes from $2.10 to $2.35 per cow per day over 90 days, you can adjust one line and see the effect straight away.

A herd budget is not a tax return, but it still needs to sit inside your wider bookkeeping. If you are a sole trader, you will still need IRD records for provisional tax, and Inland Revenue expects you to keep business records for 7 years.

If your farming structure is a company, the numbers still need to flow into the IR4 and year-end accounts. A budget that shows the season by month helps you compare cash flow against the 31 March balance date and avoid a surprise tax bill later.

GST and farm budgeting

If you are registered for GST, remember the standard rate is 15% and compulsory registration starts once turnover passes $60,000 in any 12-month period. A budget that separates GST-exclusive and GST-inclusive amounts is easier to reconcile with your GST return.

Payroll and farm staff costs

If the herd budget includes staff, build in PAYE, KiwiSaver, and ACC from the start. For example, paying a worker $26.00 an hour for 40 hours a week is $54,080 a year before employer KiwiSaver, ACC levies, and holiday pay are added.

The usual failure is undercooking variable costs. If feed is budgeted at $1.90 per cow per day but the season needs 100 cows over 120 days, a 30-cent miss becomes $3,600 before you have even touched health or grazing.

Missing the milk income swing

Another mistake is locking in payout assumptions too early and never revisiting them. On 320,000 kgMS, a drop of 20 cents per kgMS cuts income by $64,000, which can wipe out the margin you thought you had.

Leaving labour and on-farm jobs out

People also forget the real cost of work done by family members, contractors, or relief milkers. If you need 12 relief milkings at $180 each, that is $2,160 you cannot leave buried in a general expense line and hope to find later.

Using a messy sheet with no reference list

Without an Expense Lookup sheet, costs get entered three different ways and the summary becomes hard to trust. That wastes time at review meetings and usually means someone has to rebuild the numbers by hand.

That same level of consistency applies to IRD number records, where a simple reference list keeps details from being entered three different ways.

The easiest way to keep this spreadsheet alive is to review it on the same day each month, right after the pay run or milk income check. If the file gets updated on the first Monday after payout, it becomes part of the routine instead of a one-off exercise.

Small habits that keep it clean

• Copy the current season tab before you make major changes, so you always have a clean comparison point.
• Use the lookup sheet for repeat expense names, so one cost is not entered under five slightly different labels.
• Highlight totals that move outside expectation, especially if a key cost rises by more than 10%.

When to move on from a spreadsheet

If you are running several blocks, multiple staff, or lots of stock movements, you may outgrow the workbook and need proper farm accounting software. That usually happens when the manual updating starts taking more than an hour each month or when the budget no longer matches the actual cash records cleanly.