FINBIN helps you query the financial database for several different types of benchmark reports. Putting together a database query may sound difficult and a bit academic. FINBIN makes it easy to select just the right farms for your report with a few clicks of the mouse. There are five steps to each FINBIN report.

There are 5 Steps to each FINBIN Report:

1. Report:
Select the report you would like to see. For whole farm, there are several reports to select from including Income Statements, Balance Sheets, and Farm Financial Standards Measures. For crops and livestock, this is where you select the specific enterprise.

2. Location:
FINBIN contains data from several states. You can display results for a specific state or further narrow your query by county or region.

3. Columns:
You can display your report in columns based on any of the farm characteristics included in the FINBIN database. If you want to see how corn production costs have changed over time, you will want to display corn enterprise costs in Year columns. If you want to compare the profitability of dairy farms vs. hog operations, you will want to display whole farm income statements in Farm Type columns. The choices change a little between whole farm and enterprise reports but you will find the report column formats extremely powerful.

4. Characteristics:
Now you can narrow your report to include only farm and ranches that fit your needs. If you are a 1,250 acre crop producer you may want to compare yourself to only other crop farms of between 1,000 and 1,500 acres. Or maybe you want to compare yourself to only the most profitable farms. The farm characteristics allow you to quickly and easily narrow your selections.

5. Run Report:
Click on Run Report to see your results. The results are the average of all farms meeting your Characteristics selections. They are displayed based on your Columns selections. The minimum number of instances for any whole farm report or column is 10. For crop and livestock reports, the minimum is 5 instances. So if a column is missing from your report, it did not meet the minimum requirement.