The WEBISSM team met at WCREC in North Platte on October 12, 2007. Members in attendance were Matt Stockton, Roger Wilson, Tom Jenkins, Charles Williams, Homer Creutz, Michael Lau, Larry Makus, Randy Little, Larry Van Tassell, Dillon Feuz, Dave Smith, and Rick Funston. In the morning sessions individuals present introduced themselves, Matt and Roger gave an overview of what WEBISSM will be, the DECI model was described and demonstrated by Tom Jenkins, and a sample Excel version of WEBISSM was demonstrated.

Homer Creutz began the afternoon program with general comments on programming strategies. This was followed by separate meetings of the combined Research/Extension teams and the education team. Those individuals discussing the classroom application included Larry Makus, Dave Smith, Michael Lau, Randy Little, and Roger Wilson. Individuals discussing the research/extension application included Matt Stockton, Dillon Feuz, Tom Jenkins, and Larry Van Tassel. Homer Cruetz and Charles Williams discussed programming considerations. Representatives from each of these teams reported back to the whole group prior to the end of the meeting.

Education Team

The education team discussed where the program would be used and the features needed for these uses. The three uses would be for introductory, intermediate, and advanced management classes. They concluded that the output for all three levels should be the four established financial statements: balance sheet, income statement, statement of cash flows, and statement of owner equity. They would like to see a monthly statement of cash flows in addition to the annual ones and depreciation and amortization schedules included in the output. They also wanted both a cost based and accrual balance sheet and key ratios to be part of the output.

Special features needed in the introductory management classrooms are the ability to turn off stochastics and to run the program for a single year. Being able to adjust the number of years simulated was important to all three classroom uses.

The ability to bypass the DECI simulation was thought to be desirable particularly for the intermediate management classes. Being able to choose to use or not use stochastics at the intermediate level was also deemed important.

The full stochastic model using DECI was thought to be useful only in the advanced beef management classes.

Other additional issue discussed included adding other income, both on and off farm, in the analysis. This is particularly important because the grant targets small and medium sized operations. The income from many medium sized operations may not fully support a family. It is doubtful that the income from most small operations would fully support a family. That means that other sources of income need to be included.

Another additional issue discussed was including income taxes in the analysis. It is a problem for two reasons. Including other sources of income, as suggested in the paragraph above, impacts the income tax amounts because taxes paid on the additional income increases taxes due and may also cause the rates to be higher. The second reason income taxes are a problem is because the tax schedules may change. One suggestion was to address income taxes in a generic way rather than try to incorporate detailed income tax calculations.

Extension/Research Team

Recommendations from the Extension/Research Team were to include flexibility in the model. Having an alpha model available with specific outputs prior to collecting representative ranch data could help in that data collection. KOV’s need to be defined before year end so data can be collected in January-February. Price simulation should be done on a National basis to be adjusted via a local basis. The beta model should resemble the final model as much as possible.