This is the most important page in this manual. If you read nothing else, read this. Getting this wrong does not break the app, but it can cost you a whole day's work at a sale, and there is no way to get that work back afterwards.

The rule: install Cattle Log on your iPad first. Download the sale catalogue second. From then on, only ever open Cattle Log by tapping its icon on your Home Screen — never through Safari.

Why the order matters

When a stud sends you a link, it opens in Safari, the same as any other web page. You can use Cattle Log there, and it will look right and work properly. But Safari is not where the app is meant to live.

Cattle Log is designed to be added to your Home Screen, so it sits alongside your other apps with its own icon. When you do that, your iPad treats it as a separate app with its own set of records.

Here is the part that catches people out. Safari and the Home Screen app keep completely separate records, and neither one can see the other's. Think of them as two filing cabinets that happen to hold the same catalogue. Anything you write in one — your scores, your shortlists, your pen marks, the prices and buyers you enter — goes into that cabinet only. It does not appear in the other, and there is no way to move it across afterwards.

So if you download a catalogue in Safari, score forty bulls, and only then add Cattle Log to your Home Screen, the app will open completely empty. Your work is not deleted. It is still on the iPad, in Safari's cabinet, where the app cannot reach it. That is why the order matters, and why the app shows a red warning about it on the library screen.

Installing Cattle Log on your Home Screen

Do this on wifi at home, well before sale day. It takes about a minute.

1. Open Safari on your iPad. It is the blue compass icon.

2. Go to the app. Either tap the link the stud sent you, or type cattle-log-app.com into the address bar at the top and press Go.

3. Find the Share button along the top of the screen, near the address bar. It is a small square with an arrow pointing up out of the top of it.

4. Tap it. A menu slides open with a list of options.

5. Scroll down that list until you see Add to Home Screen. Tap it.

6. A small box appears showing the name Cattle Log and its icon. Tap Add in the top right corner.

7. The Cattle Log icon — a yellow ear tag with a black CL on it — is now on your Home Screen with your other apps.

8. Close Safari. From now on, always open Cattle Log by tapping that icon. Do not go back through Safari, and do not use a link a stud sends you a second time.

Only once the icon is on your Home Screen, and you have opened the app from it, should you download a catalogue. Downloading is covered in section 4.

If you have already been working in Safari

If you have downloaded a catalogue and started marking it up before installing, the app will show you a different warning to the one above. It is telling you something true and unwelcome: installing now will cost you the work you have already done, because that work cannot come with you.

There is no way around it. Nobody can move it across for you — not the studs, and not us. So the question is only how much you are prepared to lose, and the answer gets worse the longer you leave it.

If you have done a small amount of work — a few bulls scored, nothing serious — install now, and enter it again in the app. You will lose ten minutes and you will be safe from here on.

If you have done a lot of work and the sale is imminent — finish that sale in Safari rather than throw it away, get your figures out to Excel while they are still in front of you (see section 17), and install straight afterwards, before the next sale. Be aware that work left in Safari is at real risk: if you do not open that Safari tab for about a week, your iPad may clear it out on its own to free up space. The Home Screen app is far better protected against that.

Do not try to fix it by clearing Safari, deleting the tab, or reinstalling. None of that moves anything across, and clearing Safari will destroy the very work you are trying to keep.

Two more things worth doing before sale day

Install and download early, on wifi. You cannot count on having signal at the sale. Once a catalogue is downloaded it works completely offline, but it has to get onto the iPad first. Do it days ahead, not in the car park.

Open the app now and again in the lead-up. An iPad that has not seen an app for a long stretch may start clearing space. Opening Cattle Log every so often keeps everything where it should be.

In short

Install first. Download second. Work only in the app on your Home Screen. Do it all on wifi, before the day.