We understand that you may be coming in with a sizeable herd and years of data on another program, and really don’t want to type that all in again.

It’s fair to say that AotG can never be 100% compatible with other programs, and nor can other programs be 100% compatible with AotG. There are technical reasons for this, to do with how different databases are set up and designed.

However, it’s also fair to say that despite the differences in how (and what) things are recorded, they still record many things in common, such as animal names, registration numbers, sires, dams, progeny, dates of birth, colours and whether huacaya or suri.

If your program—or you—are able to provide that information in a spreasdsheet we can import that for you—please do get in touch to discuss!

Some data such as husbandry records may not be able to be imported, but it all depends on how each program records these, and how compatible the structure is with AotG’s structure. Again please get in touch to discuss.

We do recommend though, that you run your original program alongside AotG until you find yourself referring to AotG more and more and the other less and less. Eventually you will find yourself using AotG as your sole herd management program. We’ve done this ourselves with accounting programs over the years!

The secret is to decide for yourself a legacy date or changeover date. (Choosing the end of financial year is an obvious one with an accounting program for instance.) Use your original program as an archive of all data entered before that date. Use AotG for all data on and after that date. Use the time in between to get foundation data into AotG and play around and get to know the program.

And there’s nothing to stop you manually entering some of the legacy data into AotG later on if important enough—there might be an animal you absolutely need comprehensive records for. But if you do this only on a need to do and not have to do basis, you’ll find it isn’t so onerous when only done for a handful of animals and a handful of data!