To receive the Red Sky Farm Performance Analysis reports for a Farm for the first time you need to click on the Synchronise button on the Main Menu. This will then start the process of uploading the Years for which you wish to receive reports. You will be asked to confirm which Years you want processed and you will be asked to confirm the number of licenses, if any, that you will need to purchase.
To purchase a license you will need to contact Red Sky Agricultural to set up an account. You need to open an account to either get access to the lower level licenses or to purchase Full Red Sky Licenses.
The process of synchronising will take a few minutes as all data needs to be checked for compatibility with the database. The total time taken will primarily depend on the number of Years being synchronised. After you have synchronised a Year for the first time then reports are available to you without further synchronisations for the duration of the license.
Each time you make a Copy or Rollover of the Year then the Report tab is locked up. As long as the farm area has not changed and the Farm license is not past its expiry date then the reports will be unlocked when you synchronise the data. If you are completing some sensitivity analysis then it may be best to make several copies of the Year and then synchronise all of these so that you can work on a number of comparative Years' data while viewing the full Report results.
After finishing synchronising you may wish to print some reports. You are likely to want to view a number of columns of data within the one report so to confirm which other years’ data you would like printed alongside the year within which you are working, you use the Comparison button at the bottom of the screen to select the other columns. This allows you to view other years’ data alongside the one that you have completing. This could include other years for the existing farm and/or benchmark data.
Then when you click on the printer icon at the bottom of the screen you will open the report writing screen. If you want to place your logo at the top right of each page then you should first go to the Main Menu and under Options you can select your logo and size it appropriately. You are able to stylise the report in any way you choose by changing column widths and row heights, choosing font style, size and colour, and adding borders along with background colours and any other options.
The controls have been designed to make this easy to undertake. In comparison to most other software you will find Red Sky strikingly simple. Once you click on the Print button the report is presented on the screen with all the formatting buttons visible and straightforward to operate. In addition you can simplify the larger reports by clicking on 'Summary Only' which selects the most important figures and only displays these.