Cattle Inventories and flows are important metrics to understand for both financial metrics and understanding the demographics impacting the herd. BoviSync has built several features and reports that help with this understanding and tracking.
The most important part of inventorying is counting every individual animal one time. As silly as it sounds, this is often a challenge on dairies that involve multiple sites, either through ownership or via off-site growing of youngstock. A very important concept that is foundational to how BoviSync is built, is one animal-one record. BoviSync is the only software that works this way. Doing this eliminates all the messiness of multiple records in different files, and deduplicating data in EXCEL, working against ID changes over time. Nothing is more frustrating. Within BoviSync, we expose the database ID of the animal. This can be used as the permanent asset ID. Regardless of changes in eartags, EIDs, registration numbers, it will remain constant.
An important concept to understand in inventory reporting is your herd login in BoviSync. Because every animal has only one record, you need to log into the herd(s) you want to inventory. This gives detailed instructions for logging into herd: Login Options Suffice it to say, if you want to include off-site animals with your inventory, then you need to log into off-site animals as well, not just the on-site animals! This is usually done with the "By Owner" or "Include Offsite" login option.
There are a couple of reports that are helpful for you to understand herd demographics and changes over time. The Herd Inventory Report (search in global reports) shows by owner and animal category with basic demographic data (milking, DIM, percent preg, etc). You can easily add additional columns to customize as needed.
Another report that shows changes over time is the Cattle Inventory Report (search in global reports, available by location). This report requires the farm to have Performance Reporting enabled. This report shows cattle inventories over time. The report Historic Herd Inventory Report helps you to better understand dairy-level production and performance over time in relation to inventory.
Financial Inventorying can be made easy with reports like Inventory with Cattle Flows Report. There are a couple of ways you can do this; by group or by individual. Financial reconciliation by animal is a superior method as it allows you to reconcile to individual animals and find all the exceptions (e.g. sold in the distant past, un-died animals, un-dry animals) to reconcile. To do individual animal reconciliation, you can un-group the "Inventory with Cattle Flows Report" and export to excel. Do this every month, then you can use lookups in excel to compare and ensure all the animal match (with the exceptions of sold last month, and new animals this month). Feel free to add columns, add custom labels, etc to make your work in EXCEL easier.
You can also do group level inventorying. Using the report above you can get all your numbers like number of miking animals, youngstock, fresh heifers, dry cows, new calves, purchased animals, sold animals, etc, that you need to track monthly animal numbers of flows of one group into the next. Just double check you are logged into the right herd(s) and you have your dates set appropriately in the report. Any changes in dates will lead to problems as you won’t be reconciling records from the same day on the farm.
Another important consideration, BoviSync reporting is on live data. You may want to export to keep a snapshot of what you used for reconciliation. As new entry and editing could impact the reporting if you were to run it again later, even using the same dates (e.g., someone enters a died event two months late and post-dates it)
An important topic is the traceability of animals. Within BoviSync, you can get a report like Animal Traceability Report. This report allows you see animal IDs, pedigree, and all farms the animal has ever been on, including the dates of entry/exit and days on farm. Additionally reporting like Treatment Administration Report, gives your dairy traceability on pharmaceutical treatments of animals. As consumers and regulatory demands increase their focus on traceability, BoviSync already delivers this for you, so you can be ahead of the curve and hopefully use it to improve the market for your milk!