How to manage livestock ageing in Farm Focus

Livestock ageing is an industry-wide concept used for simplicity and consistency. In Farm Focus, all livestock classes are set to automatically age up at the end of the financial year, unless the settings are changed. This process ensures that closing livestock numbers are 'aged-up' to be next year's opening numbers.

Managing livestock numbers accurately is crucial for performance reporting and your accountant will use the closing livestock numbers when preparing your end-of-year accounts.

To check or update your livestock ageing settings:

1. Go to Settings > Codes > Farm Codes.

2. Drop down the livestock category and select the livestock class of interest.

3. Scroll down to the Age To section.

4. You will see how that stock class is set to age, and can change if necessary.

Tips:

• Coding: When coding sales, purchases, or non-financial events (e.g., births and deaths), code the animal to what it was at the start of the financial year. For example, lambs sold in July should be coded as hoggets if the financial year ends on 30 June since they have aged up on that date.

• Keep it simple: Keeping the stock classes in your code list minimal makes managing the livestock reconciliation simpler. For example, instead of having multiple codes for lambs, use Replacement Lambs and Prime Lambs.

• Rename codes: If you use another software for on-farm activities, consider renaming the stock classes in either system so they are called the same thing in both platforms. This makes it much easier to align your numbers.

• Reorder code list: From Settings > Codes > Farm Codes, the categories and extended codes can be dragged and dropped to re-order the list, and this is the order you will see in the plan and the reports. Having the livestock codes in a sensible ageing order can help when reviewing your livestock reconciliation.

• Non-financial events: Don't forget to record non-financial events, such as births and deaths. These must be entered manually as there is no associated record to code.

• Stock born on-farm: There should not be lambs or calves entered in the opening numbers of your stock reconciliation. These animals are born within the financial year and will age up to the next stock class at the year’s end.

• Autumn-born calves: All calves born will age to one-year-olds at the end of the financial year, even Autumn born calves who will be only a few months of age at year end.

Manually Ageing Livestock

While this is not recommended, you can choose to turn the automatic ageing at year-end off and manually age your stock if you would prefer.

To turn the ageing off:

1. Go to Settings > Codes > Farm Codes.

2. Drop down the livestock category and select the livestock class of interest.

3. Scroll down to the Age To section.

4. Select None from the list and click Done.

To manually age stock using Transfer:

1. From Actuals go to the Stock Activity tab.
   
   
2. Click the Add births, deaths etc button

or

1. From a plan go to the Livestock grid.
   
   
2. Find the stock class you want to manually age, and click the +Add button on that line in the grid.
   
   
3. From the Event list select Transfer/Transfer out.
   
   
4. Enter the event date for the movement.
   
   
5. In the Code In/New Code area, select the stock class you want to age the animals to.
   
   
6. Enter the quantity of animals you want to transfer, as well as any useful description or note, and a tag if required.

Tip: You can enter both actual and budgeted non-financial events (such as births, deaths, and transfers) directly from the livestock grid in your plan. Entering them here is often easier, as you can see the stock quantities on hand while entering the events - information that isn’t visible from the Stock Activity tab in Actuals.