Machinery Operations and Assets - Options and Setting Up

Machinery operations are required, while assets are optional. 

Operation Categories are built into agCommander. We figure the list will cover all your needs. Certain categories: Chemical Application, Fertiliser Application, Harvesting, Hay Making and Planting are used by the program to filter your user-defined Operations when you choose one of those operation types.

Running Costs

You can assign a cost per area, hour or item to operations.

You can set up a Default Area Per Hour for each operation. By doing that, agCommander will calculate the hours for a job based on the area of the fields you've chosen. You can alter the calculated hours if you need to. 

Setting up assets and using assets in machinery events is optional.

If you do set up assets, it is important that you assign operation to those assets so that your list of assets is filtered by operation when adding your machinery event records.

Running Costs

If you assign running costs to an asset, those costs will be used in reporting in preference to your operation costs.

TIP FOR COSTING MACHINERY: What you might like to do is set up costs for your operations but not for your assets. That makes sense for jobs involving multiple assets. A tractor and an implement for example. 

Fuel Consumption and Costs

Fuels are set up under Consumables and costs maintained like all other costs in the Input Costs Management system.

If you want to record fuel consumption and costs, you need to set up assets and assign them a default consumption per hour.
Should you set up fuel consumption data for Tractors or Implements?
As tractors can potentially be used for many jobs, both light duty and heavy duty, it might be best to assign the fuel consumption to your implements. Of course for self propelled machinery (sprayers, harvesters, etc.) just assign the fuel consumption settings to those assets.   

PLEASE NOTE: For Irrigation Records 

A water source or pump is set up as an asset for irrigation records and if you want to record the costs of operating that water source you will need to assign either a cost per hour or per unit of water for your water source assets.