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What is a livestock production tracker?

Production trackers are a core component of Figured - but what are they used for?

Alexandra Henley avatar
Written by Alexandra Henley
Updated over a year ago

Production trackers on Figured are used to keep on top of all the various forms of production on your farm - whether you're a sheep and beef farmer, a dairy farmer, a potato farmer, or something in between.

For livestock you would have a production tracker for each type of livestock on your farm i.e. a dairy cattle tracker to track your dairy herd, a sheep tracker to track your flock of sheep.

Your livestock tracker is where you will record your stock reconciliation and can be used for end of year tax valuations.
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Using a livestock tracker

In your livestock tracker you'll have a series of stock classes that are unique to your livestock type, and in turn you can record the detail of your livestock movements on the farm in as much (or as little) detail as you wish.

You will record all livestock movements in your tracker, these are made up of the following:

  • Births / natural increase

  • Deaths / missing

  • Ageing

  • Sales

  • Purchases

  • Inter-tracker transfers (when you have two like trackers, you can move livestock between them i.e. dairy to dairy)

  • Rations

  • Reconciling (for when movements fall outside of the above categories)

You can choose to enter these movements as they happen on the farm, or you can enter them retroactively every week, month, or even a year after the fact depending on what you intend to use Figured for.
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How the livestock tracker works with actuals and forecasts

You enter actual and forecasted transactions into trackers.
An example of how you would use your livestock tracker in these three views is below:

  • You have a sheep tracker for the sheep you run on your farm

  • You would enter a forecasted purchase of 500 ewes you plan on buying in next year to bolster your herd

  • As the time draws closer, you’ve had a hard winter and you realise you don’t have the feed capacity to support this many new sheep, so you update this transaction in your forecasts with a purchase for less sheep - 150 ewes

  • The truck rolls in your driveway with the ewes you’ve just purchased from the yards, you enter an actual purchase for 150 ewes

The tracker then passes this information to your preferred accounting software and other parts of Figured like your planning tab, and your reports.

For video tutorials check out our YouTube Livestock Tracker playlist here.

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