Who's Missing? Faster Pasture Counts with Checks

You went over the whole north pasture, counted 46 pairs, and the book says 48. Now comes the hard part: which two? Was it the old brockle-faced cow that likes the brush along the creek, or a heifer that slipped through the wire into the neighbor's last week? Your count tells you something is wrong. It doesn't tell you what to go looking for.

Most of us handle this with a tally on a notepad, a mental list, or a phone full of half-finished notes. It works until the herd gets big enough, or the pastures far enough apart, that "I'm pretty sure I saw her" stops being good enough.

That's the job Checks in Cattle360 was built for. It's not just counting heads. It's knowing, tag by tag, who you laid eyes on and who you didn't.

What Is a Check?

A check is a headcount you do on horseback, in the pickup, or on foot. Cattle360 hands you the list of every animal that should be out there, you tap each one off as you find it, and when you're done, everything you didn't see is written down as Not seen.

Found means you saw it, and the time is recorded.
To Find means it's still unaccounted for while the check is running.
Not seen means you finished without finding it. That's your "go look for these" list.

That last part is the whole point. A count of 46 is a number. A list of the two tags that weren't there is something you can actually act on.

How a Check Works in Cattle360

Start the Check

Open Production → Checks and tap Start a Check. Pick the pastures and groups you're about to cover. You can pick several, and they're merged into one list, so a cow that's in two of them only shows up once. Each one in the picker shows when it was last checked ("Checked 12 days ago," "Never checked"), so the pasture you've been neglecting stands out.

Checks are available on every plan. Free accounts check by group. Checking by pasture needs a Basic or Premium plan, since Pastures itself is a paid feature.

Ride and Tap

The screen starts on To Find, so the list shrinks as you go. Tap a row once and it lights up with Tap again, then tap again to mark it found. That second tap is on purpose. A phone in a gloved hand on a moving horse takes a lot of accidental taps, and nobody wants a cow marked found that they never saw.

Calves sit under their mamas. The default order puts each calf right under its dam, so you tick off a pair together instead of hunting for them separately.
Find a tag jumps straight to the cow standing in front of you without scrolling a 200-head list.
Found one not on the list adds a stray from the next pasture. It's flagged Unexpected, which usually means a gate, a fence, or a move that never got written down.

Finish, Even If You Didn't Find Everybody

Tap Finish and Cattle360 tells you how many you found and how many will be marked not seen. If you ran out of daylight, finish anyway. That's the only way to record what was missing, and you can reopen the check later with the pencil icon on the Checks screen to pick up right where you left off.

Built for Where Cattle Actually Are

The back pasture is never where the cell signal is. So Checks doesn't need one. Open the check once while you've still got bars, and the whole list downloads to your phone. After that, every tap is saved on the phone first and sent up when you get back in range. A little banner shows how many changes are waiting, and you can watch that number drop to zero on the drive home.

A Little About Voice

Here's where it gets fun. On the Basic and Premium plans, there's a Voice button right next to Finish. Tap it, and instead of tapping cows off you just say the tag numbers as they walk by:

"22" marks cow 22 found.
"12, 14, 19" marks all three.
"33 pair" marks cow 33 and her calf together, and "33 calf" marks just the calf.
"Yellow 50" sorts out two animals that share a number by tag color.

You don't even need to look at the screen. A high ding means it marked them. A low dong means a number needs a glance: it's not on this check, or two animals share it. Said something wrong? Undo puts your last phrase back. And when the phone mishears a tag (it will turn "Y5" into "wifi" now and then), Cattle360 takes a second look and picks the tag on your list you most likely meant, without ever marking an animal that isn't on the check.

Voice works in the Cattle360 app without signal on most phones, as long as the phone's offline speech pack is downloaded before you ride out.

Voice doesn't stop at checks, either. In the mobile app, Basic and Premium accounts can add a Voice shortcut to the bottom bar and just ask: add a calf, record a treatment, or check what the rain gauge has been doing. It shows you every change before it saves anything.

What Your Checks Add Up To

Every finished check builds a record of when each animal was last seen. You'll find a Last seen date and a Check History card on every animal's record, and a warning when a cow has been missed on several checks in a row.

Better yet, there's a Last seen filter on groups, reports, and fieldsheets. Make a smart group of active cattle "not seen within 30 days," put it on your dashboard, and it keeps itself up to date. A cow drops off the list the minute a check finds her.

Pro Tips

Start the check before you leave signal. Once the list is on your phone, you're set for the whole ride.
Check the same ground on a routine. The "last checked" note in the picker makes the forgotten pasture obvious.
Finish every check. An unfinished check doesn't count toward Last Seen, no matter how many cows you ticked off.
Talk in short bursts. A few numbers, then a pause, gives Voice the clearest results and keeps Undo small.
Print the sheet for a second loop. Export a check as a PDF or CSV and hand it to whoever rides back out to look.

Wrapping Up

A headcount tells you something's off. A check tells you who. Checks gives you the list, works where the signal doesn't, and on paid plans lets you count cattle with your voice and keep both hands on the reins.

Next time you ride out, log in to Cattle360, open Production → Checks, and start your first check.