After your initial record import, calving is the main way you'll be adding animals to CattleIQ across the year.

Calves are born on their own schedule, dozens to hundreds of them, and the app is built to make that one-at-a-time work as fast as possible. This guide covers how it all fits together.

The shape of it: the paper calf book replaced with a few taps, configured once at the account level, plus a saved report that becomes your living roster of this year's calves.

Add calf to dam

The fastest path to create a new calf record is the Add calf to dam shortcut, sitting just under Animals in the main menu (alongside Add animal, but specifically for calves).

What it does:

1. Opens a Search for dam popup. Search by ID for the cow that calved.
2. Opens the Add a calf form with the dam pre-set, and several other fields already filled in based on your account's calf-inheritance settings (covered below).

You can also start the same flow from a cow's detail page. Open her record and click Add calf in the Bloodline card. Same form, same pre-population.

What's pre-filled

When the Add a calf form opens, the app drops in everything it can reasonably infer:

• Identifier: the dam's primary identifier ID, with the type swapped to whatever you've set in Inherited Calf Identifier Type (Settings > Ranch Account > Calves). So a dam carrying M103/Tag produces a calf with the ID M103 under your inherited type, often Calf Tag or a year-tagged variant like Calf Tag '26.
• Labels: any labels the dam carries that match your Inherited Calf Labels list get copied onto the calf.
• Dam: pre-set to the cow you searched for.
• Sire: filled in only if the dam has exactly one possible sire in her breeding history. If she has multiple recent breedings or no recorded sire, this stays blank for you to fill in (or leave alone).
• Birth event: a Birth event with today's date is added automatically.

Everything is editable before you save. Tweak the identifier, change the date on the birth event, add a weight, swap in a different inherited label set if this calf needs special handling. Then click Save, and you land on the new calf's detail page.

A few quirks worth knowing

A handful of things that catch first-time users:

• Sex defaults to female. If it's a bull calf, change it before saving. The app doesn't try to guess.
• Twins are two records. There's no native "twin" relation. Create one calf, then start the flow again for the other. Both end up with the same dam and the same starting identifier, so you'll edit the identifier to keep it unique.

Configuring inheritance

The fields the calf inherits are set at the account level, not per-calf, so you only have to think about it once.

Go to Settings > Ranch Account > Calves. Two settings:

• Inherited Calf Identifier Type controls which identifier type the calf's primary ID gets created under. Most ranches use a Calf Tag type or a year-tagged variant like Calf Tag '26, so calf records sort cleanly until each calf gets its own permanent tag.
• Inherited Calf Labels is a whitelist. Pick the labels you want to flow from dam to calf at calving time. Common picks: ownership labels, brand labels, pasture labels, registered-herd labels. Leave it tight: anything you don't include here stays with the dam alone.

You can change these settings whenever you like. They only affect future calves; existing records aren't touched.

The Calf Book report

The other half of the calving setup is a saved report that gives you a running view of the season's calves.

Build a report (see Building reports) that filters to all animals under a chosen age. Add columns and charts that match how you actually evaluate the crop: sex, death, labels, etc. Save it as Calf Book or New Calves. Mark it as a favorite so it pins below Reports in the main menu.

That's now your running calf book. Open it any morning of calving season and the picture is current: total calves to date, sex breakdown, death/loss rate, and whatever else you put on it. No transcribing, no flipping through a notebook.

What's next

Building reports covers the report-building side in detail. Using labels covers the label setup that the inheritance flow relies on. And Adding your first animal record walks through the full add-animal form if you're creating an animal from scratch instead of from a dam.