Taking care of your animals involves a lot more than just feed and treatments! You'll use things like fencing, bedding, enrichment items, and a lot more in your farm operation, and you can track their usage with Farmbrite's Inputs feature. This is directly linked with your Farmbrite inventory, and the cost is automatically associated with your animal's breakeven amount for accounting.
Recording Inputs
You can add inputs from indivdiual animals or groups. Just navigate to the record, and select Inputs. Then, choose New Input. In our example below we are navigating to set group of chickens where will record the input for the fencing we used to repair the coop. Alternatively, you might access a specific animal to add hay useage for bedding in it's stall, or a smart group to add the replacement of a scratch post brush in a pen or the distribution of balls and toys in an animal enclosure.
While it is not absolutely required, if you use Farmbrite's inventory to track these items, you can first select to subtract from your inventory items. Even without selecting something there, you can still supply an amount used, and what it was in the fields below. You can supply any notes you need, and the save. In our example screenshot below, see that we're using one roll of chicken wire to repair the coop.
Bonus: Notice the red message displayed above after we saved? Since we are using the chicken wire from our inventory, the system is displaying a notification that we are running low. That way we know to order more; you can learn more about this feature here.
Accounting and Inventory
Now that we've recorded the Input, let's see how that affected our accounting and inventory.
To see this recorded in the animal's breakeven amount, we'll navigate to that flock's Accounting tab and see the $75 (the cost of one roll of chicken wire) added to the breakeven amount.
For Inventory, we can see the input usage recorded in the history for that item. Of course, this will only be shown if you choose to subtract the Input from inventory in the previous step.
Reporting
You can access the Input History report to see a history of input usage. Navigate to Reports>Standard reports, access the Livestock tab, and then find the Input History report. you can customize this for different date ranges, and see what was given to what animal, and when.
