WR Family Farms

WR Family Farms

Wes Bowman grew up farming. He considers himself a first-and-a-half generation farmer, as his father was a part-time farmer when Wes started farming alongside him at age 10. What began with hogs and cattle turned into Wes renting and farming land on his own by age 16. Today, he manages WR Family Farms alongside his father, wife, four sons, and one full-time employee. They operate just under 1,700 acres in northwest Ohio and manage both row crops and livestock.

With a deep commitment to efficiency and clarity, Wes found himself at a crossroads: the traditional spreadsheet-and-QuickBooks setup was no longer sustainable.

Challenges

Multilayered Thing of Spreadsheets & QuickBooks

Numerous Complex Entities

Unknown Cost of Production

Tedious Bookkeeping

Before switching to Traction Ag, Wes relied on years of QuickBooks data plus a tangle of custom Excel spreadsheets to track inventory, profitability, and field records. Each business entity required its own QuickBooks file, and there was zero data integration between them.

Wes needed a single system that connected accounting with real field activity.

Wes first learned about Traction Ag through his brother-in-law before signing up for a trial at the Fort Wayne Farm Show in early 2024. Wes was skeptical at first, unsure of what he was getting into.

“I had never used a cloud-based software at all and had never used any software that would do what Traction does. And so there were a lot of unknowns. To me that felt kind of scary,” he recalls. But after his initial hesitation, he found that the product was exactly what he needed to manage accounting for the farm. For Wes, the switch to Traction Ag was surprisingly simple. “It actually was extremely easy for me,” he says. “The learning curve was a lot less painful than I expected it to be to get Traction up and running.”

After nearly 30 years of farming, Wes found a system that finally supports the way he runs WR Family Farms. Efficient, accurate, and adaptable.

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Results

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One centralized hub

Before Traction Ag, Wes describes the farm’s record management system as something that had morphed into a complex, multilayered arrangement of spreadsheets and QuickBooks. Because they have multiple entities on the farm, Wes had to create numerous companies in QuickBooks that had no data sharing between them. Along with QuickBooks, he had supporting spreadsheets, oftentimes tracking the same data many times to use in different ways. It took an excessive amount of time and energy to enter, and it was hard for anyone else to decipher.

“I was always behind. And consequently, even if I would arrive at good data, it took too long to get it and I didn't have it when I needed it to make crucial marketing decisions,” Wes recalls. “That was the motivator [for getting Traction Ag], to bring the information together to be able to harvest data and make good decisions in a timely fashion, in a real-life timeline... Not six or eight months too late.”

Now, Wes manages it all in Traction Ag’s cloud-based system. Instead of re-entering data multiple times for accounting, inventory, and field records, Wes logs transactions once and they automatically sync across his operation. Traction reduces double and triple data entry. It integrates with the systems he already uses, so he’s not wasting time repeating himself.

“One of the powerful things about Traction is that, unlike QuickBooks, it actually has a full system that integrates accounting with our real-time field records to give us good, easy-to-understand data,” Wes says. “It brings our data together in one database so that we can make good financial decisions.”

“My favorite thing about traction is the simplicity of data input.”

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Field profitability reporting

WR Family Farms operates across owned, rented, and sharecropped land, which makes for complex accounting. Previously, when working with QuickBooks, each entity had to be its own company, and there was no way to share any data between them. Wes had to keep multiple spreadsheets with the same data in order to make sense of the different entities. All of this resulted in confusing numbers, double or triple entering data, and no clear sight to financial health.

With Traction Ag’s field profitability reports, Wes can effortlessly track profitability for any combination of his entities. He can easily toggle between views to see where he's making money and where adjustments are needed.

“I can pick and choose any combination of our entities to show up on any reporting. So you could turn a couple of them on, a couple off. You can have them all on, you can have just one of them on. Any combination of entities can be viewed in the reporting on Traction,” Wes says. “Once you learn to navigate the reporting, it gives you very good information very quickly and [it’s] easy to understand.”

This insight is especially valuable when evaluating lease renewals or expansion opportunities. “The field ops reporting does the whole farm or by crop, or even field by field, so that I can see exactly what's happening profit-wise in each different field with its yields or landlord arrangements,” Wes says. “It gives us a platform to integrate our accounting and our field-by-field profitability seamlessly together in one database.”

With commodity prices fluctuating, having current numbers has never been more critical. Wes relies on Traction’s real-time cost tracking to make smarter marketing decisions. “As we've entered this challenging marketing time with lower commodity prices, it has really helped me make confident marketing decisions in real time with real financial data.”

“[I’m not] guessing what I have done, but I’m viewing numbers that happened in real life, and organizing them in a way that I can tell exactly what's happening field by field, or at a whole farm level.”

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Climate FieldView™ integration

WR Family Farms uses Climate FieldView™ for planter, sprayer, and yield mapping records, but Wes wasn’t able to benefit from all the data collected at the field level. “There's a lot of good information there that I couldn't translate to financial information before. In fact, often I wouldn't even spend the energy to track down that data because I was too busy and I would be behind so I wouldn't get to it.”

By implementing Traction Ag and the integration with Climate FieldView™, that valuable data is now easy to utilize. Traction’s import queue automatically matches that information with inventory and accounting. As Wes enters input purchases into inventory, those same products show up in his field records and are matched against real data pulled from Climate FieldView™. “I was able to take the data that was already all there from what I had been doing in accounting and what FieldView had been inputting and very easily and efficiently bring that all together to get detailed real field op records,” Wes says. “The import queue feature of Traction is definitely one of my favorite time saving and accuracy features of the whole system... I was just highly amazed at how it triangulated to get the inventory to reconcile with the field records that had come in on the import queues.”

“Traction makes my life easier by integrating with systems that I already have in place on my farm. So less entry, less double or triple entering of data.”

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Saves 4+ hours/week

Traction Ag automates accounting on the farm so Wes doesn’t have to spend time fighting with spreadsheets and QuickBooks for imprecise numbers. He says that Traction Ag saves him hours every week in bookkeeping and data entry, especially during the busy seasons. “I would say that Traction saves us a minimum of four hours a week of bookwork. It allows me to have more time to deer hunt in the fall instead of entering field harvest records,” Wes says with a grin. “I stay more caught up on my bookwork and so I can do other things in my life that I enjoy and that need to be done, without being burdened down with knowing I'm not getting my bookwork done properly and timely.”

Above all, Wes values the clarity and confidence Traction brings to his daily decision making. All accounting and field records are handled in a single, unified system. Inventory entries flow naturally into field ops and reports. “[Traction Ag] integrates accounting with our real-time field records to give us good, easy-to-understand data, to make marketing decisions on the fly like we need to on a farm… I'm not sure what I would do if Traction Ag wasn't available anymore. It would not be a good situation for our farm.”

WR Family Farm’s transition to Traction Ag demonstrates how even long-standing, complex operations can simplify, integrate, and accelerate decision making, all while gaining back the time to focus on what matters most.

"Traction saves us a minimum of four hours a week of bookwork."

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