Labels are CattleIQ's most flexible and powerful tool for managing animal records.
Pick anything you'd already be saying in your head: pasture (North 40, South pen), calf crop year (2026 calves), breeding cohort, Cull or Sell for upcoming decisions, Good mom as a selection note, Owner or Brand for co-managed herds, Calf died for quick mortality flags, See notes to mark animals with a note worth reading. Make a label, apply it to the animals it fits, and that group is now filterable, chartable, and bulk-updatable from anywhere in the app.
The Labels page
Click Labels in the main menu. The page lists every label you've created. Each row shows the label's name, its color, a drag handle to reorder, and (on custom labels) a delete button. Changes don't take effect until you click Save at the bottom.
The order you set here controls the order labels appear in dropdowns elsewhere in the app. Drag the most-used labels to the top.
Creating a label
Click Add label and new blank row appears. Enter the label's name, pick a color from the dropdown, and hit Save.
Two rules to know:
- Each label name has to be unique.
- Colors come from a fixed palette so they stay consistent across reports and badges.
Editing a label
Anything you set when creating a label, you can change later. Click the name to rename, click the color to repick, drag the row to reorder. Click Save.
Deleting a label
Be careful with this one! You can click the trash icon on the label's row to delete it completely from the system. Deleting a label removes it from:
- Every animal that had it applied.
- All label option selectors.
- Any reports using it for filtering.
- This cannot be undone.
The Sire label
The Sire label is built in. It can't be deleted or renamed, but you can change its color.
Applying it to a male animal makes that animal eligible to appear in the sire dropdown when entering lineage on calves or breeding events. See Adding your first animal record for how it gets used.
Applying labels
Two ways:
- From an animal record. Click the pen icon next to Labels on the animal's detail page to open the picker.
- In bulk, from a report or workday. See the next section.
Females don't get Sire offered as an option. Males with active or reference status do.
Filtering by labels
On any report, click Edit on the Filters card. Labels appears as one of the available filter sections. Turn it on and pick which labels to filter by.
Multiple selected labels combine with AND: the report shows animals that carry all the selected labels. There's no built-in "or" or "without" UI for label filtering. If you need either, set up the right base conditions when building the report, or build separate reports for each set.
Bulk updates with labels
From a report or workday, you can apply or remove a label across many animals at once.
- Select the animals (or operate on the full filtered set).
- Click Bulk update in the page actions.
- Pick Labels, choose Add or Remove, and select which labels.
- Confirm.
Useful for ranch-wide passes: moving everyone in a pasture to a new label after rotation, flagging a whole calf crop with 2026 calves, or clearing the Cull label from animals you decided to keep.
What's next
Once you're comfortable with labels, the next step is Building reports, where label filters combine with other criteria for sharper views of your herd.