Create your account and set up your farm

An assistant takes you through it on first sign-in

Creating the account takes an email address and a password. On your first sign-in, a setup assistant opens: your name, your farm’s name and its location, which gives the dashboard its weather, your regional settings, then your species, breeds and colours.

If you tick the Racing pigeons species, the species step also offers the ‘I take part in pigeon races (racing pigeons)’ switch. Switched on, it adds a ‘Pigeon races’ step right after: your federation, your loft placed on the map, your speed and distance units. Every setting there is optional, and whatever you leave aside is waiting in Settings, under ‘Pigeon races’ and ‘Racing pigeon loft’.

Every step can be skipped: everything the assistant asks for can be found later in the app. The one about species still deserves your attention, and the rest of this page explains why.

A species is not a label, it is a set of rules

In AviarySoft, a species carries the biological settings that later let the app do the work for you. They live in Configuration, Species tab, by opening the species record.

The three middle settings are recent, and they are the ones that change the most. They answer a question breeding software rarely asks, although it decides everything else.

From which egg does the female start brooding?

A female does not necessarily brood the day she lays. Between the first egg and the real start of incubation, a day or two weeks may pass, and it is that gap, not the laying date, that determines the hatch date.

Three patterns exist, and the Start of brooding field expresses all three.

Early brooding. The female settles from the first or second egg and keeps laying while she broods. Each egg starts its incubation on its own date, and the chicks hatch spread out. Setting: from egg no. 1 or no. 2.

Intermediate brooding. The female starts mid-clutch, around the third egg. The first hatches are grouped, the last ones lag behind. Setting: from egg no. 3.

Brooding once the clutch is complete. The female builds up her clutch without brooding it, then settles once the last egg is laid. Every egg starts together and they hatch together. Mechanically, this is also the pattern of any egg placed in an incubator. Setting: when the clutch is complete.

The help text under the field gives the reference points the app uses for the species it ships, and the call is yours for your own birds: you know them better than a default value, and the field can be corrected at any time.

The species shipped by default already come configured: two eggs two days apart with brooding from the second for pigeons, twelve eggs one day apart with brooding once the clutch is complete for chickens and quail, ten for ducks, six two days apart for geese, four a day apart with brooding from the third for canaries, five two days apart with brooding from the second for budgerigars, two two days apart with brooding from the second for doves.

What these settings actually produce

Here is the calculation, in three steps:

The rank is capped by the actual clutch: a species set to the third egg that lays only two starts on the last one laid, for want of a third. And “when the clutch is complete” comes down to taking the real quantity as the trigger rank.

Three examples, using the settings shipped by default:

For chickens, the gap between the laying date and the hatch date reaches thirty-two days, eleven of which are the clutch building up. Without this setting, the app would announce a hatch eleven days too early.

What you will see when recording a clutch

As soon as a species has a laying rhythm, its laying form changes shape, which you will meet again in the step about clutches:

• the date field reads 1st egg date rather than simply date;
• a Start of brooding field appears, pre-filled by the calculation above and editable;
• the quantity arrives pre-filled with the declared clutch size, editable too.

That editable field is not a token precaution. Two common practices escape any per-species calculation: removing eggs and replacing them with dummies, which deliberately synchronises the hatches, and using an incubator, where everything starts on the same day. In both cases you correct the date and the calculation steps aside.

How the ring number is entered

The ring number stays a free identifier, because every federation engraves its own way. The species record lets you pick the entry format that matches your rings, and that choice only affects typing comfort.

Number then year splits the field in two. The current year arrives pre-filled, leaving you only the number to type. This suits rings whose year closes the engraving.

Free field shows a single box, where you copy the engraving as it is. Choose it if your rings carry their year somewhere other than at the end, or carry none at all.

A third setting, ring colour by year, shows the number on the colour of the year of birth, as on the real ring. The table arrives pre-filled with the COM six-year cycle, and every line can be changed, since racing pigeons and poultry follow other sequences.

Your existing rings never change when you touch these settings, and they can be changed at any time, species by species.

Breeds and colours: start small

Every species has its own breeds and its own colours or mutations. The temptation is to enter everything at once, including what you hope to keep one day.

Do the opposite: declare what is on your farm today. Adding a breed takes ten seconds the day the first bird of that breed arrives, whereas a list of forty breeds of which three are used slows down every entry for years.

What you can change later, and what resists

Almost everything can be changed afterwards: species, breeds, colours, statuses, health record types, exhibition types, expense categories.

The Tags tab completes the list, for your own keywords. If the Racing pigeons species is active, the Statuses tab selector also offers “Race Levels” and “Race Categories”, managed like exhibition types.

Two limits are worth knowing now. Items marked “System”, the species and statuses shipped by default, cannot be deleted; they can be disabled, which removes them from the pick lists without touching the data already using them. And a breed or a colour used by a bird can no longer be deleted while that bird exists, which is a safeguard rather than a nuisance.

The configuration is stored on the server and follows your devices. What you set on the computer is there on the phone.

The tour of the interface

Once the farm is set up, a few settings make the app more pleasant from the very first days: how each module opens, the order of the menus and the dashboard. They are all set in the same place, the Configuration page, except the dashboard, which is customised on itself.

The opening view of each module

Every module opens in grid, list or table, and that choice is set module by module in the Default views tab. The grid shows cards, the list goes dense, the table gives sortable columns.

The same page lets you decide that a module opens straight into fullscreen on a computer. That is the setting to make for the one you open first every day.

The choice of view only applies on a computer: on a phone, lists always open as a list.

The sidebar

In Configuration, Navigation tab, you reorder the modules and hide the ones you do not use. The order you choose also applies to the navigation buttons on the phone, which spares you having two mental models of a single tool.

The collapse button, at the bottom of the bar, reduces it to its icons. On a thirteen-inch laptop, that is a hundred or so pixels handed back to the working window, and the state is remembered between sessions.

The dashboard

The dashboard is an assembly of widgets, each summing up one aspect of the farm: the flock by sex, the week’s and the month’s egg production, revenue, expenses, the laying chart, the breakdown by species and breed, upcoming hatches, ringing due, recent activity, the weather for your location.

Customising the dashboard

Click “Customise” at the top of the page: the dashboard goes into edit mode without leaving the page. On a computer, the open windows tidy themselves into the taskbar, the sidebar gives way to the gallery of hidden widgets, and a bar at the top of the page reminds you that you are editing. Navigation comes back when you leave, and the windows return in the same order.

A widget can be grabbed anywhere to move it, and its bottom right corner enlarges or shrinks it. The cross removes it and puts it in the gallery, from which you drag it back into the grid or add it with a click. “Reset” restores the original layout, “Cancel” drops your changes, and “Done” saves them. The greeting stays at the top and does not move.

On a phone, “Customise” opens a list, “Your dashboard on your phone”: you drag the handle to reorder the widgets, and the switch shows or hides each one. That layout belongs to the phone and does not change the computer’s.

The quick actions widget is worth a visit: it carries four shortcuts you choose, and it decides what you reach in one click every morning. To choose them, switch to edit mode: the cog on the widget (“Choose quick actions”) opens the selection.

On a phone

AviarySoft gives you every feature of the computer on a phone, adapted to mobile use. The bottom bar leads to the modules you use most, in the order set in the Navigation tab, and the “More” menu gathers the others. Records and forms take the whole screen, a floating “+” button adds an item from every list, and plans, such as the aviary plan, become lists that are easier to browse with a thumb.

Your settings and your data are the same on both devices: what you enter at the aviary on the phone is on the computer straight away.

Help and the assistant

The “Help and support” menu, at the bottom of the sidebar, leads to the getting started guide, the frequently asked questions and the contact form. It also restarts the guided tour of the interface, and brings back the welcome guides of each page.

The assistant, opened from the bottom bar, answers your questions about the app on every plan. With the Pro subscription, it works on your farm: it looks up your data to answer, and above all it records birds, clutches, health records or expenses for you, from a sentence, a photo of a breeding notebook or a screenshot of an old file. It prepares every entry on a card, and nothing is saved until you have approved it.