Getting started with HerdBook — and a new way to handle paperwork

Starting a HerdBook is meant to feel like walking out to the pasture with a fresh notebook — not like configuring software. When you sign up, we ask two things: your name and what to call your ranch. That is it. From there we walk you through adding your first animal, because a herd management tool with no animals in it is just a login screen.

The first-animal step is intentionally light. Snap a photo, give them a tag or a name, pick a species, and you are in. You can add breed, sex, birthday, sire and dam later. The point of onboarding is momentum — one animal on the page, one profile you can tap into, one thing that already looks like yours.

Once you land in the dashboard, HerdBook starts filling in around you. Add a few more animals and the counts, the pasture map, and Heat Watch begin to make sense. Import a spreadsheet from your old system and we will match sires and dams by tag so lineage carries over. Every profile gets photos, weights, health records, offspring, and notes — the things you actually flip back to when you are standing at the chute.

The newest piece — and the reason I wanted to write this post — is Smart Document Upload. Ranch paperwork is relentless. Vaccination sheets from the vet, registration certificates, sale receipts, breeding letters. Historically that stack lived in a truck console or a kitchen drawer. In HerdBook you can now snap a photo of any of it, or upload a PDF, and we do the filing for you.

Here is what happens under the hood. The document goes into secure storage on your ranch. HerdBook reads it, pulls out the useful bits — animal tag or name, dates, vaccine names, registration numbers, weights — and looks across your herd for the animal it belongs to. If it is confident, it suggests a match. If it is not sure, it shows you the top candidates and lets you pick. You confirm, tweak anything that looks off, and hit apply.

From that one upload, HerdBook can add a vaccination record to the animal's health tab, update their registered name or herd number, log a weight, and attach the original document to their Documents section so you can pull it up months later. Nothing gets thrown away — the file lives on the animal profile as a signed, private link only your ranch can open.

You can start an intake from three places: the Smart Upload button on the dashboard, the same button on any animal profile (which skips matching and files straight to that animal), and the Documents to review panel in your Inbox, where anything mid-review waits patiently until you get back to it.

None of this replaces the notebook feel we started with. It just means the notebook keeps itself organized while you are out doing the actual work. Try it on your next vet visit — take a picture of the sheet on the way to the truck and see it show up on the right cow before you get home.