A cash box tells you what came in. It cannot tell you whether Saturday was quiet because the season is soft or because it rained — and by the time you find out, the season is over. This workbook records the weather beside each day’s gate, so the two stop looking the same. It is built for U-pick farms, pumpkin patches, corn and sunflower mazes, hayride operations, farm stands, and Christmas tree farms and tree lots, and it works in Excel, Google Sheets and LibreOffice.
A pumpkin patch or Christmas tree farm often trades its whole year in a few short weeks
Agritourism is not year-round retail with a busy patch in it. It is a short, weather-exposed run of gate days — often only a few weeks of them — where one or two people work the gate, the wagon, the maze and the stand at once, alongside a seasonal crew who have never used the tools you use. That shape breaks most of the tools on offer. Of the ones we compared, the investor-grade farm models are sold on five-year projections, not on the day at the gate. The farm bookkeeping templates categorize and total, then stop. The ticketing platforms record what sold and take a cut of every ticket to do it — sometimes billed to you, sometimes passed to your customer.
Not one farm-spreadsheet listing we read advertised a weather column — and the weather is one of the facts that decides what a day was worth.
What the workbook actually does
It logs the weather beside the gate, and then uses it
The Daily Gate Log is one row per operating day: date, day type, a weather band from a closed five-item dropdown, hours open, admissions, vehicles, and what each attraction took. Ten further columns compute from those, and nothing in the computed path is free text — which matters when the person filling it in on a Saturday is new this month.
Because the band is on every row, the Season Dashboard can group your days by weekday and by weather and show what an average day of each kind has actually been worth. A wet Saturday and a clear one stop averaging into each other. A parallel grid prints how many days sit behind every figure, and where fewer than three do, the workbook says so instead of quoting a number.
It forecasts the next operating day from your own season
Pick the weekday you are planning and the weather you expect, and the forecast strip returns admissions, gate revenue, spend per head and a confidence line — all of it the average of your own matching days. It is not a weather service and it does not pretend to be one. It also estimates what the weather cost you: each wet or cold day measured against what that weekday took in clear conditions, added up across the season.
It prices labor as a live share of the same day’s take
Your shift log rolls onto the day it was worked, so every row of the gate log carries labor dollars per $100 of that day’s gate and shades red over the target you set. A comfortable season average stops hiding the one fine-weather day you overstaffed. Then the planner sizes the next day for you across nine crew positions, each with the visitors one person can cover and a floor you will not open below, priced against the labor budget the forecast crowd affords.
It counts what is still standing in the field
The Crop & Inventory Countdown runs acres × units per acre × the share good enough to sell, less everything you have sold, to units remaining, days of inventory left and a projected sell-out date for each of eight grades — flagged against the last day that grade is worth anything. Sells out early, on track, will strand unsold: three different decisions, and you find out while you can still act on them.
It ranks attractions on what they leave behind, not what they took
Each of eight attractions is charged its own direct cost per use, then ranked on contribution margin per visitor. Concessions can gross more than the hayride and still be the weaker line. The biggest number on a revenue report is rarely the best one.
It hands you next season’s plan
When the gate closes, every weekday you opened is scored on what it contributed after labor and variable cost, and returns open, open if fine weather, or never opened. Below that: crew by day, planting quantity with the acres to add or drop per grade, and a price-change back-test that re-prices the days you actually ran rather than a hypothetical season.
Table stakes, done properly
Setup carries 18 cost lines split into variable and fixed — several of them, including liability insurance, portable restrooms, parking area prep, wristbands and tickets, signage and promotion, in the line-item vocabulary the extension budgets use. Each per-acre line is charged against the acres it is actually spent on rather than against the whole farm, which is the difference between a break-even figure you can defend and one inflated by acres that line was never spent on. Break-even attendance comes out of those: total fixed cost divided by price less variable cost per admission.
Pumpkin patch in the fall, Christmas tree lot in the winter — one workbook
Late summer you are planning the pumpkin patch and the corn maze. Autumn you are planning the Christmas tree lot. The same file carries both — one purchase you open every time a season is being planned, not once a year.
It opens on a worked season, not an empty grid
The workbook ships pre-filled with a fictional farm running a 2027 fall and tree season: 22 logged operating days, 137 logged shifts and 14 tour bookings, with every dashboard figure recomputing live from those rows. Read it, see each flag fire, then clear it and log your own days.
Want to start logging before you buy? The free Pumpkin Patch Daily Gate Log is the one tab everything else here is built on — one row per operating day, with the same closed five-band weather dropdown and ten days of the same worked season already in it. It collects; the full workbook is what reads a season of those rows back to you.
Outgrown a spreadsheet you update by hand? Ardent Seller (opens in new tab) is the living version of this kind of file — your stock, costs and margins tracked in one place as the season runs, rather than typed up afterwards. There’s a free plan, and you keep the workbook either way.
A note on the numbers
This is a workbook, not software: no ticketing, no card processing, no live weather feed. You type the band you saw. The file lists 13 sourced figures — most of them extension research from Rutgers, Penn State, NC State and Kentucky, two of them journalism, and one a vendor blog used only as framing, each labeled in the file with where it came from and what it is not. Some come from 2000s-era publications. Where a figure seeds a default it is a method input with a sample value, so the arithmetic has somewhere sensible to start. They are not today’s price for a pumpkin or a tree, they say nothing about what your own farm will take, and you are meant to replace them with your own. Nothing here forecasts your earnings or your profit.
