Bring the records you already keep.

Start from a template — on every plan

Most people asking to import don't have a spreadsheet in our shape. They have a page in a notebook, a list in Notes, or nothing at all. So don't invent the columns: download a file that already has them.

It's made for your ranch and the record you asked for: every column headed and annotated, the fixed values as dropdowns, and your own pastures, groups and animals as dropdowns too. An Instructions sheet and one example row ride along inside the file for whoever's filling it in at the kitchen table.

• One template per record type — animals, weigh-ins, medications, breeding, finances, inventory, tasks, equipment, crops and pastures. Or all of them in one zip.
• Dropdowns bound to your ranch, so a pasture name that doesn't exist can't be typed by accident.
• No AI and no credits, on every plan including Free.
• The same result every time — the columns are matched by name, not guessed at, so a monthly routine is a routine.

Fill it in, upload it back as .xlsx or .csv, and it's recognised straight away. Nothing to describe, nothing to correct, nothing to pay for. Our own exports work the same way: export a ledger, edit it in a spreadsheet, upload it back. So do exports from breed associations — the American Angus Association's Registered Herd Inventory today — which are recognised on sight, no AI and no credits.

Or upload the workbook as it is — Ranch plan

Not a template, not a cleaned-up version with the columns in our order: the file you actually keep, with merged cells, the header row three rows down and a column called "Bred To". That's what the AI is genuinely good at.

Land & Herd reads the sheet and proposes a plan — which column becomes a tag, which a birth date, which a breed, and which parts of the file are animals versus tasks versus inventory. Then it stops and shows you. Change any mapping, drop a column, or ask about a decision in the chat beside the preview — "why did you map that to classification?"

Ancestry comes through too. If your sheet names a dam (mother) and a sire (father), the import links them as real relationships rather than leaving them as text — including calves listed against a mother.

You approve before a single row is written

• A full preview of what will be created, before anything is.
• A chat beside the plan for the columns it guessed wrong.
• More than one target — animals, tasks, inventory and more from one file.
• Dam, sire and calves as real links between animals.

Propose, review, confirm, then write. An import that silently creates four hundred records is worse than no import at all.

What it won't do

• Update records. Import creates them. Re-uploading a file to change the ones you already have is a different and much larger job, and we'd rather say so here than have you find out later.
• Lift your plan's limits. A free ranch can import its herd, and the 25-head cap still applies — you get the tool, not a way around it. You're told before anything is written, not halfway through.
• Take a file over 2 MB. That's tens of thousands of rows of records; a workbook bigger than that is usually carrying photos or formatting, and saving the sheet as CSV brings it under.

What it costs

• Our templates: every plan, Free included. No AI, no credits.
• Your own workbook (AI help matching spreadsheet columns): Ranch plan, or its 14-day trial.
• Credits: 10 to start a mapping, 1 per correction message. Ranch includes 250 a month.

How credits work →

And the way back out

Import brings records in; export sends them out — CSV a module at a time, PDF documents, or the whole ranch as a ZIP. On every plan, free included: a system of record you can't get data out of isn't a trade we'd offer.