Finance

The number your accountant files answers a question about tax. What a machine actually lost in a year is a different number, and nobody outside the gate can write it for you.

The price of money is on no invoice, so it never enters the count. It sits in four places, all four of them already inside the farm's own statements and slips.

Three public institutions split the same kind of cost three different ways, and every one of them publishes which way it chose. That is the part a farm can copy.

The people who publish the repair estimate name your own records as the better source. Those records exist. Three of the four places they sit are not the office drawer.

Every published cost method either estimates this pile with a percentage or drops it. Your bank statements hold the real figure, and it takes an afternoon to add up.

The figure that settled the last big decision lives in somebody's head. Six months on, nobody can say where it came from or whether it has aged.

Two records the farm already has, put side by side. The engineering standard says what the machine should have burned. The invoice says what you paid for.