A new version of Red Sky Farm Performance Analysis was launched on 19 September 2005. This new version can be downloaded at no cost from this website.
The latest version allows all users to edit the split of effective milking area versus effective youngstock area without using up an Editable Area Year. Simply go to ‘View Area Details’ on the General tab of any year and make the required change to ‘Effective Milking Area’. You will find that the ‘Effective Area-Dairy Young’ cannot be greater than 20% of the Total Effective Dairy Area although this should never be a restriction. Even if a dairy farm retained 30% of replacements by numbers and grazed all of these on the home dairy area, this should still only equate to 15%-17% of the total effective dairy area.
For users of Annual Report licenses, one area that may have created some frustration in the past is where you came to rollover or copy a previous year’s data and found that your client had confirmed some different farm areas to those that were provided last year. With an Annual Report license there was no flexibility to make these changes. Now when faced with this situation you can simply tick the ‘Make Editable Area Year’ on the General tab and edit any of the areas you wish. Then when you synchronise the latest farm data for the first time, these new areas will be locked up.
The latest version of Red Sky has some refinements in both speed and overall functionality. This continues our drive to ensure that all users can produce reliable and robust reports in the shortest possible timeframe, and with the least possible inconvenience to ongoing work practices.
This previous version included a "Run All Calcs" button at bottom left of the General tab that when selected runs all calculations for that Year. This ensures all calculations as well as all reports are correctly populated. There is also a NEW Red Sky print driver for printing Adobe Acrobat PDF reports. This now allows you to maintain an electronic file record of any reports and then email these to clients or advisors. The PDF installation file is also available from our free download web page, which after downloading you should double click on the file and follow the prompts. Then when you go to print a report from within Red Sky you select 'Red Sky PDF' from the printer selections.
This version also had a number of enhancements that have been developed to improve speed and user friendliness so that reports can be delivered in a shorter time. This version runs faster on your computer (and uses less RAM), as well as there being no restriction on size of databases. You will be able to have as many farms and years in a single database as you wish with little or no change in performance as more data is added. We are also launching the new Fertiliser/Farm Gate Nutrient Balance module, along with some specialty reports for sheep and beef farms. These new reports can be viewed under the ‘Special’ tab in Reports. There is also now an option to hide the second stock breed/type and hiding this will be the default setting when you install the new version. To make visible the second stock breed you will need to un-tick the checkbox in the Options screen.
The previous version significantly broadened the application of Red Sky to cover a more diverse group of farms as well as a wider group of rural professionals. The main new functionality was full stock reconciliations for each livestock class, including fuller reporting of both livestock sales and purchases, and product sales. There was an expansion from 4 to 6 farming enterprises, with cropping now having its own specific class and individual crop types recorded separately. There have been a number of other enhancements that continue to improve the accuracy and applicability of Red Sky.
To learn more about the opportunity to integrate Red Sky with accountancy software and to download the additional software required please go to 'Tips Using Software' and select the web page corresponding to the software you presently use. There are a number of other enhancements being released with this latest version and to learn more about these go to 'The Software - Development' or click here.
The Red Sky TRAINING CD-ROM (available for $17 and ordered from this website) includes a comprehensive tutorial so that new users can learn how to use Red Sky without further assistance. This takes you through all the steps required to use Red Sky and includes a step-by-step layout of screen shots for everything from downloading the software off our website through installation, entering data, printing reports and completing scenario planning.