Supervised livestock record import
Bring your livestock records with human review
Eleven years of calving sheets can mean three column layouts and tags typed four ways. The move should not become another season of manual entry or a black-box load.
Ranch.Bot imports existing livestock records through a supervised process. Upload accepted spreadsheets, documents, or photos in Tools. Automated extraction creates a proposed manifest. A person compares it with the source, flags anomalies and ambiguities, and approves an exact set of non-destructive writes. Files never load themselves.
Accepted files, one concierge path
Every format below enters supervised review. Send up to 10 files per request, with a limit of 25 MB per file. File acceptance is not an extraction guarantee.
- Source
- Spreadsheets
- Accepted files
- CSV, XLS, XLSX
- Possible proposal
- Readable groups, animals, identifiers, and dated record candidates
- Helpful context
- Name the current sheets. Note date and unit conventions.
- Source
- Documents
- Accepted files
- PDF, DOC, DOCX, TXT, MD, JSON
- Possible proposal
- Readable livestock identities, events, and supporting notes
- Helpful context
- Say what each file covers and which pages matter.
- Source
- Paper record photos
- Accepted files
- JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP
- Possible proposal
- Readable entries proposed from photographed pages
- Helpful context
- Keep pages in order. Point out glare, gaps, or mixed years.
What happens before anything loads
The extraction step is automated. Review and approval are human steps.
- 01
Upload the source
Use Tools → Import after signing in. Ranch.Bot stores the uploaded files with an import request. Uploading alone does not create an animal or record.
- 02
Extract a proposed manifest
Automated extraction turns readable source entries into proposed groups, animals, identifiers, and dated records. Proposed is the key word. No write has run.
- 03
Review source and anomalies
A person compares the proposal with the source, checks sensitive-data anomalies, normalized counts, sample rows, ambiguities, skipped rows, and implausible totals.
- 04
Approve the exact proposal
Approval is tied to the source-file fingerprints, farm, and operation count. If a fact only the producer can know is unclear, the proposal waits for an answer.
- 05
Load, count, and spot-check
Approved creates and additions run in order. Ranch.Bot stops on a mismatch, then reads back counts and representative records before the request is marked loaded.
The source stays beside the proposal
A normalized record is useful only when the reviewer can trace it back to what the file actually said.
- Original source
- The uploaded file remains the review reference. Extraction does not replace it with a cleaned copy or rewrite the source bytes.
- File and row trace
- The proposal records each source filename and SHA-256 fingerprint. Every proposed operation points back to a file and row or page reference.
- Livestock identifiers
- Management tags, EIDs, names, tattoos, and brands stay separate identifier types. Review checks leading zeros, repeated tags, and long numbers changed by spreadsheet scientific notation.
- Stop-and-flag anomalies
- Unexpected personal or payment details, duplicate submissions, implausible counts, unreadable rows, mixed date formats, and unclear units are flagged instead of pushed through.
Uploaded files are farm data. Read the privacy policy for storage and account-deletion choices.
What the import will not guess
Send the original source. Do not make it look cleaner by removing the odd rows that need review.
- If a sheet says Feb 31, the import flags the date. It does not choose another day.
- A blank stays unknown. An unreadable tag is not invented, and a repeated identifier is not silently merged.
- The approved manifest does not delete or overwrite existing farm data. It can create groups and animals, add identifiers, and create dated records.
- One approval covers at most 50 operations. Larger batches use separately reviewed and approved chunks.
- There is no fixed public turnaround. Readability, ambiguity, and batch size change the amount of review.
- A photo sent by SMS does not enter this process. Records for extraction must be uploaded through Tools → Import.
Check the result, then know the export limits
After a load, Ranch.Bot checks counts and sample records. You can inspect the farm and export the fields included by Tools, but the current export is not a complete reversal of the import.
- Structured JSON
- Farm details plus up to 10,000 active animals, 10,000 active records, and 10,000 active groups. Record entries omit their animal and group associations.
- Simplified CSV
- An animals section and a records section with the main fields shown by the current export tool. It is useful for spreadsheet review, not a complete history round trip.
- Not in the general export
- PDF output, Farm Memory, and an archive of the files uploaded with an import request are not included in the current Tools export.
Import questions
Is the livestock record import self-serve?
No. Uploading starts a concierge import request. Automated extraction prepares a proposal, then a person checks the source, anomalies, counts, sample rows, and ambiguities before approved writes run.
Should I clean the files before uploading them?
Keep the original source. A cleanup pass can remove clues such as a leading zero, an old sheet name, or the difference between a blank and a zero. Add a note about which files are current, the date range, and the units instead.
What happens to duplicate identifiers or impossible dates?
They are flagged for review. Ranch.Bot does not invent a tag match or replace an impossible date with a guess. An unclear row can be skipped or returned as a question before any write is approved.
Can Ranch.Bot import photos of paper records?
JPEG, PNG, GIF, and WebP files are accepted through Tools → Import for supervised extraction. Readability still matters. A photo being accepted does not guarantee that every handwritten mark can be identified.
Can I export the records after they are loaded?
Tools exports structured JSON or a simplified CSV. Each active animal, record, and group collection is capped at 10,000 entries, and record entries omit animal and group associations. The general export is not a source-file archive or PDF export.
Bring one real file to the walkthrough
See the secure Tools → Import path and talk through the shape of the source before sending a large batch. Do not email sensitive files unless Ranch.Bot asks you to use that channel.
Once the existing history is in place, follow the SMS-first setup guide to text new records from the field and review them in the web dashboard.