For fourteen months I kept the books for Oka’s Farm. It was my first real job in agriculture and the one that taught me what the textbooks leave out.
The day-to-day was not glamorous. Receipts in a shoebox at the start of each month. A spreadsheet that grew into a small chart of accounts: inputs, labor, fuel, transport, harvest, sales, drawings. I rebuilt the ledger in Excel because the owner did not want to pay for QuickBooks, and because honestly the operation did not need it yet. The structure was QuickBooks-shaped — five-digit account codes, monthly closings, a simple income statement and a working balance sheet — but the engine was a workbook the owner could open on a laptop at the kitchen table.
Payroll was the part where school did not help me. The farm had a small permanent staff and a larger pool of seasonal workers paid per task. Reconciling those two pay structures, with cash advances (“vale”) running against future wages, took me a long time to systematize. I ended up with a separate vale ledger and a settlement step at every payday. After three months of doing it that way, disputes dropped to near zero.
Payables were the second hard lesson. Suppliers around here run on relationships and verbal terms, not invoices. I would receive a sack of fertilizer with no paperwork and a “bayaran mo na lang sa next” understanding. I built a payables aging tracker just to keep my own promise to the owner that the farm would never look untrustworthy to a supplier. We did not miss a payment in the fourteen months I was there.
What I took out of the role was the muscle memory of closing a real book. Not a homework book — a real one, where the cash balance has to match what is actually in the drawer or you do not go home. That has stayed useful in every product and client system I have touched since.
The role is archived now. The owner moved to a simpler operation and no longer needs a dedicated bookkeeper. I keep the templates and the lessons.