How to use LivestockBook

A rough walkthrough of the app, from first launch to a finished export. The whole thing works offline, and everything you enter is stored on your own device.

The app has four main tabs along the bottom — Records, Animals, Setup and Export — and that is roughly the order you use them in. Your Account is reachable from the top of all four tabs, and that is where Profile, Settings, Reports and the rest live.

Individual animals and herds & flocks

LivestockBook keeps livestock in two ways, and it is worth knowing which you need before you start:

• Individual animals — one entry per animal, with its own tag or ID and its own timeline. This is what you want for cattle, and usually for sheep and goats, where animals are identified individually.
• Herds & flocks — a group of animals recorded as one unit, with a head count instead of individual identities. This suits laying flocks, batches of weaners, and anything else you manage as a group rather than animal by animal.

You can use both side by side, and the app names the group to suit the species: a herd of pigs, a flock of hens, a batch. Records work slightly differently for each — see Log records below.

Set up your farm

Start in the Setup tab. This is where you create the things your animals and records get attached to:

• Farms — one entry per holding, if you keep animals in more than one place.
• Locations — wherever animals actually are. You name these yourself, so call them what you call them: paddock, shed, pen, hutch, field, barn, coop.
• Labels — your own tags for organising stock, such as Breeding, Organic or Winter shed. An animal can carry several, and a herd or flock can too.
• Medicines & Vaccines — the products you use, so they can be picked from a list when you log a treatment.

You do not have to fill all of this in before you start. Add what you need now and come back to the rest later.

Worth doing once at the start: open Account from the top of any of the four main tabs, go to Profile, and add your business or farm name and a logo. These appear on the PDFs you export.

Add your animals

Go to the Animals tab and add your livestock, choosing whether you are adding an individual animal or a herd or flock. Species covered: cattle, sheep, pigs, goats, chickens, ducks, turkeys, geese, donkeys, horses, buffalo, rabbits, alpacas, llamas, camels and ostriches.

For an individual animal, fill in the details you keep track of — tag or ID, name, breed, sex, date of birth, acquired date, and the farm, location and labels it belongs to. You can add a photo too. Tapping the animal opens its own page with a full timeline: every record logged against it, in date order.

For a herd or flock, you give the group a reference, a species and a head count, along with the same farm, location and label details. The group gets its own timeline, and its head count moves as you log births, deaths, sales and purchases against it.

Import an existing list

If your stock is already written down somewhere else, you do not have to retype it. LivestockBook can bring animals in three ways:

• Type the tag numbers — quickest when you just need the IDs in.
• Paste a table — copy the rows straight out of a spreadsheet or another app.
• Import a CSV file — pick the file, and a blank template is available if you want the right shape to start from.

Whichever route you take, the app shows you what each column holds, lets you correct anything it guessed wrong, and gives you a preview to confirm before a single animal is saved. It is meant to make switching over from another app or a spreadsheet a short job rather than an evening's typing.

Log records

The Records tab is the day-to-day part of the app. Add a record, choose what it applies to, pick the type, set the date and add any notes.

These record types are available for both individual animals and herds & flocks:

• Movement — animals moving between locations or farms.
• Weight — a weigh-in. For a group this is an average across the animals rather than one figure.
• Birth — new arrivals. For a flock of birds this reads as Hatch.
• Death — a loss, with the reason if you want it.
• Vaccination and Medication — treatments, pulling from the medicines you set up earlier, with dose and withdrawal details.
• Health Check — a routine inspection and what you found.
• Sale and Purchase — stock leaving or joining, with the price.
• Other — anything that does not fit the list above; you give it your own title.

Herds and flocks get a few extra types, because a group has questions an individual does not:

• Feed — feed bought or used, with the cost, usually the largest running expense.
• Headcount — for putting a total right when the number on screen no longer matches what is in the shed.
• Egg Production — eggs collected. Poultry only, so a sheep keeper is never offered it.

For groups, the count-changing types — births, deaths, sales and purchases — ask how many animals were involved and adjust the head count for you.

One record across many animals. When a record applies to individual animals, you can pick them one by one or pick a label and take everyone carrying it in one go. That is what labels are really for: drenching the whole breeding group is one record, not forty.

The habit worth building is logging things as they happen rather than trying to reconstruct them later. It only takes a few seconds per record.

Find things in the app

Both the Records tab and the Animals tab have their own filter and sort, for looking things up on screen — narrowing records down by animal, type or date, or narrowing the animal list by farm, location, label, species or status. This filtering only changes what you are looking at; it does not decide what gets exported.

Export your files

Exporting has its own tab, with its own filters, so what you export is chosen there rather than inherited from whatever you were last looking at. In the Export tab you pick:

• An animal register — your livestock listed with their key details, filtered by farm, location, label, species or status.
• A records export — the records themselves, filtered by animal, record type and date range.

Either can come out as a PDF or a spreadsheet (CSV) file. PDFs carry your farm name and logo, so they are ready to print, email or hand over at an inspection. The file goes through the normal share sheet, so you can save it to Files, iCloud Drive or Google Drive, or send it straight to someone.

Record-keeping requirements differ from country to country, so check what your own local rules ask for. If something they require is missing, let me know and I will look at adding it.

Check your reports

Reports, in the Account area, give you a breakdown of your livestock and your activity over different time periods — a quick overview of what you have and what has been happening, without going through records one by one.

Back up your data

Because your data lives on your device rather than on a server, backups matter. In Settings, Backup saves everything — animals, herds and flocks, records, farms, locations, labels, medicines and your profile — into a single file that you save wherever you like. Restore reads that file back in, which is also how you move your data to a new phone.

It is worth taking a backup every so often, and definitely before changing phones.

Still stuck?

The FAQ answers some of the more common questions, and it is still growing. If yours is not there, ask in the Facebook group or email me directly — feedback from users is what shapes the app.

And if LivestockBook is doing its job for you, leaving a rating genuinely helps other farmers find it.