Goat records that work with no internet

Last updated 3 November 2026.

Short answer: keep the herd book on a laptop, not on a website. Then it works in the barn with no signal, and catches up when you are back in the house.

On BackYardHerds, in a thread called record keeping for goats, a Kiko breeder in North Carolina listed what they track. It is a workbook with a sheet for each job: goat info (breed, registry, tag, sire, dam, birth and weaning weights), hoof trims with a score out of ten, worming (wormer, dose, weight, reason), fecal counts, monthly weights, a care sheet for symptoms and treatment, and breeding (doe, buck, breed date, due date, kid date, litter size). Every sheet starts with the goat’s name. (Read on 3 November 2026.)

That workbook is a database already. Each sheet is a list, and the goat’s name ties them together.

Why a web app is the wrong home for it

• The work happens where the signal is worst: in the barn, the kidding pen, the far paddock.
• A page that was open can still fail the moment you save, because each save goes to a server.
• The photo of a hoof or a FAMACHA eyelid is taken there, not later at the kitchen table.

A herd book that lives on the laptop

Bionic Forms builds a small app from a spreadsheet or a sentence, such as “goat records with worming, hoof trims, weights and breeding”. Our desktop app for Windows, macOS or Linux keeps a full, encrypted copy on the computer. With no connection at all you can:

• Add a worming or a hoof trim with the date, the dose and a note.
• Attach a photo to the record it belongs to.
• Search and sort: every worming by date, every goat by tag, breedings by due date.
• See breedings on a calendar by breed date.

When the laptop finds a connection again, the changes go up by themselves, and a second computer sees the same records.

Getting your workbook in

Drop the .xlsx on our home page. A workbook with several sheets shows you their names and asks which one to start with, usually goat info. Bring each other sheet in afterwards with Import inside the app; each sheet becomes its own list. Bring goat info in first. When a later sheet has a Goat Name column, each row is linked to the goat it names, so opening a goat shows its hoof trims, wormings and weights. Free covers unlimited apps and 10,000 entries per app.

Where this is honest

• The names have to match. Capitals do not matter, but a goat spelled differently on the worming sheet than on goat info is left unlinked. If two goats share a name, nothing on that sheet is linked, because we cannot tell which goat you meant. The column needs to be called Goat Name.
• No formulas. A due date worked out from the breed date, or a daily gain worked out from two weights, comes in as a plain value. Type it in.
• No phone app yet. Offline is the desktop app only; in a browser, ours needs a connection too.
• Set it up while you have a connection. The AI that builds the app runs on our server. Using it afterwards does not need one.
• We are small and pre-launch. We say plainly which parts are not finished, and your data can always be exported again.