Moving your farm records off paper without losing a week

Don't try to copy everything

The fastest way to stall a move to digital records is to try to type in every page of every old notebook. Years of history feel valuable, but you rarely look at them, and copying them takes weeks. Keep the notebooks on a shelf and bring across only what you need to run the farm from tomorrow.

What to bring across

• Every flock on the farm today: breed, date placed, age, number placed and number alive now.
• The last few weeks of records for each flock: eggs, deaths and feed. Two to four weeks is enough to see trends from day one.
• Feed in the store: bags of each feed on hand, and what you paid for them.
• Money owed to you: each customer's unpaid balance.
• The people who record: who works in which house, so each person can be set up.

What to start fresh

• Flocks that have already left the farm.
• Old sales and payments that are settled.
• Anything you only keep "just in case". It's still in the notebook if you need it.

Pick a clean start date

Choose a start date at the beginning of a week or a month. Everything from that date goes into the new system. Everything before it stays on paper, apart from the opening figures above.

Run both for one week

For the first week, keep the notebook going alongside the new records. At the end of each day, compare the two: same eggs, same deaths, same feed. Differences show you where someone is unsure what to record, while it's still easy to fix. After a week that matches, put the notebook away.

Make one person responsible

Someone, usually the manager, should look at the day's records every evening for the first month. Are all houses recorded? Do the numbers look right? A five-minute check each day stops small habits, like skipping the afternoon collection, from setting in.

Train on the real thing

Show each worker how to record their own house, on their own phone, during a normal shift. Keep it to what they record: one person may only need eggs and deaths, another feed. People learn faster with real birds in front of them than in a meeting.

In OrnisNest, you set up each flock with its breed, bird count and arrival date, then invite workers to record on their phones. The Daily Log shows which flocks are recorded each day, so gaps are easy to spot.