Back in the hay-day of my computer business, I signed on as a FarmWorks dealer. At the time, their only product was Trax and I set up my farm to use that. Then they added Site and Funds, and I also used those to see how they worked on my farm and figured I'd use my experience to support those I sold to. I had the whole thing setup. Scanned ASCS maps and imported them in a fairly close GPS representation of field outlines, had my Funds chart of accounts setup and could print both cash or accrual reports at the touch of a button.

Nearly everyone will admit that there is a steep learning curve and considerable work to get the complete package setup. I climbed the curve and did the work and had it all setup -- just like the book said. Then after doing that, I decided the pleasure wasn't worth the pain for my operation. Why?

1. Like every GIS package I've run across, they all seem to need fields and tracts to be well defined and none have been able to deal with splitting or combining tracts that happens as part of real operations. ASCS maps have things split into tracts that will end on legal land boundaries and for sure, never span a different section. My fields may span more than one section and in some instances will contain parts of up to four sections if the physical unit happens to fall on a corner of 4 sections. So the process of Pick a tractor, pick an operator, pick an implement, load the implement with product, set rate, fuel the tractor, select the operation, click the field, complete the field and have all the costs neatly associated with said crop so they show up on the accrual reports, all falls apart when you have to guess how many acres of each tract were worked in a particular day when they took multiple days and spanned several fields or tracts. In the end you end up guessing how many acres were worked when and how much fuel they used. This says nothing of what happens if you get all set to seed a field, make a couple rounds, decide it's too wet and maybe should wait a couple days, so you move to a different field and seed part of that while waiting for conditions to improve, and then leave that partially completed while you move back to complete the one you originally started. Then to top it all off, you really need to come in after the end of the day and figure out how to lie to the program so what real life operations took place, are entered into the system in a close approximation. It is still GIGO and any illusions that you'll have reports accurate to 2 decimal places are at best a dream. Of course, the other option would be to farm my farm in the order that Teegarden and Nusbaum think it should be farmed and operated, so their system will come out all nice and neat. Chances of that happening are not good here.
2. Making transaction entries left a lot to be desired in the versions I used. You couldn't set up new income or expense accounts on the fly. They had to be done as a separate part of actually making entries and to top it off were rather involved to make. Same with new merchants. If you happened to be out of town and bought something at a store that would never be used again, there was a lot of useless info that needed to be entered before the program would actually believe that there was such a merchant and you really wanted to use him. Make a mistake, like entering $65.35 when you really meant to enter $55.35 and not catch it until it came time to reconcile the bank statement and the monks that administered the Spanish Inquisition look like real humanitarians as compared to what it took to correct the seemingly innocuous mistake.
3. Balance sheets: This issue isn't solely related to only Funds, as all accounting packages I've seen, fail misearbly here. The value attached to owned land is a guess at best. It goes up, it goes down, and may not even be relevant if your land is never intended to be sold. Lots of guys got themselves in lots of trouble when they valued land at what current market conditions said it was worth, got big puffy chests at the thought of just how prosperous they were, and used the phantom equity to borrow money they really shouldn't have been borrowing. Grain inventory valuations are again a guess. Still have yet to come across a guy who truly knows and is willing to share his knowledge about what I will get for my grain when it comes to market. Depreciable assets are similar. We all know that depreciation schedules prepared for the IRS don't correctly show the true worth of what's in the machine shed, or even the machine shed itself. We can make a guess and it may be fairly close but it is still a guess and we're back to GIGO. No better or worse if it's in an expensive accounting program or scribbled on the back of an old envelope.

For my operation, and the way I farm, I've thoroughly learned three different programs. Decided to use one that focuses on ease of entry and tracks mainly cash basis with ease and flexibility of cash based reports and retreival of supporting documentation if that ever becomes necessary. That turns out to be Quicken here.