Organizing Horses

[Shannon Davis]

Does anyone use an outside source (Excel/word/website/etc.) to organize their barns and horses? Have an “ol’ fashioned” way to keep track of things in game? Would anyone have the time to explain their process of how they keep things organized or what they do to make it easier to keep track of everything? I’m open to something that takes time to build, I figured it would be best to start the process now while my barns are small and manageable.

Of course, I know that the game offers the ability to build different barns in order to organize your horses, I am just looking for a more affordable way to do it. I do invest in SIMperior, and it is a godsend, but I can’t justify buying additional barns at the moment.

[Rochelle Bos]

I used to keep spreadsheets, but honestly never kept up with keeping it utd. Custom barns saved my butt

[Kelly Haggerty]

My sheet has columns A-Z.

A is horse name, alphabetical
B-F is gallop, age, gender, surface, and distance
G is source, but I don't use it anymore except for leases. When I was new it was helpful to keep track of who came from where.
H is free-form comments, I use it for running style remarks or to target specific spots for a horse
I is a divider
J-Z are weeks 1-16 and break, during the season the horse will have the cell filled out with Tired, Work, BT, or it's racing location like "US_CA" or "EUR"

This helps me set training and enter because I can filter by blanks to not show anything that is tired or already entered. There are probably better formats, and I know some people keep really slick spreadsheets, but this is what mine looks like.

[Meghan Kingsley]

I tried spreadsheets and finally gave up and just spent enough money to get custom barns. Then I made custom barns for which week the horses need to enter. I played around a bit with barns for the 'every two week runners' and the 'every three week runners' but I found barns labeled something like "enter week 1" "Enter week 2" etc. work far better. When entering horses, it's far less of a task to go through each barn and check for unentered horses than it was to go through the entire racing barn, and it's easy to move a horse to the following week's barn if there isn't a suitable race for him in the week he's scheduled to run. Once every horse in a barn is entered, I rename the barn for a later week. Several of the long-time players seem to use a similar system, and it does make things easier.

[Shannon Davis]

Thank you for the responses! I may try to get some spreadsheets built to see if it will help until I can get some splurge funds to spend on barns.

[Durzo Blint]

I use a spreadsheet and custom barns.

Customs barns I sort by:
- 8 Running Barns (allowance+): DS, DM, DR, TS, TM, TR, and a claiming race barn (productive peaks and allowance), and a race twice barn (productives or lower from decent enough pedigrees hoping for a jump (never get one, but without hope, what do I have?)
- 6 Breeding Barns: DS, DM, DR, TS, TM, TR
- 6 Training Barns: DS, DM, DR, TS, TM, TR (makes it a lot easier to select and bulk train based on equipment at the correct surface and distance)
- 1 Holding barn for productives that are progressive/late-bloomers

Spreadsheet:
- Racing: Map out race schedule for the better stakes and freaks - have highlighted the weeks when noms are due
- Breeding: By far the biggest reason why I keep a spreadsheet. One large spreadsheet with all my mares and their history and current stud and gender that I'm breeding to this year
- Misc tabs: Past stewardbred auctions and their gallops, History of Derby and Oaks winners and their race schedules, names that I've put on pensioners

[Abby Brooks]

Does anyone use an outside source (Excel/word/website/etc.) to organize their barns and horses? Have an “ol’ fashioned” way to keep track of things in game? Would anyone have the time to explain their process of how they keep things organized or what they do to make it easier to keep track of everything? I’m open to something that takes time to build, I figured it would be best to start the process now while my barns are small and manageable.

Of course, I know that the game offers the ability to build different barns in order to organize your horses, I am just looking for a more affordable way to do it. I do invest in SIMperior, and it is a godsend, but I can’t justify buying additional barns at the moment.

I dont use it to organize my current horses, but I do have excel sheets where I have been tracking the progression of my allowance + yearlings and their bloom comments. I can send that to you, if you'd like it

[Shannon Davis]

I dont use it to organize my current horses, but I do have excel sheets where I have been tracking the progression of my allowance + yearlings and their bloom comments. I can send that to you, if you'd like it

I would appreciate that, I’m struggling to keep up with my yearlings already! I can message you my email address if that would be easiest

[Shannon Davis]

Well, once I had a smart moment and realized that you get unlimited barns with the custom barn subscription, it suddenly became more affordable. I was seriously wondering how people could afford $32/barn/year! Anyways, I did subscribe to the custom barns. Any additional tips on how to set the barns up or other spreadsheet options would be welcome. Thank you all!

[Gwen Morse]

Well, once I had a smart moment and realized that you get unlimited barns with the custom barn subscription, it suddenly became more affordable. I was seriously wondering how people could afford $32/barn/year! Anyways, I did subscribe to the custom barns. Any additional tips on how to set the barns up or other spreadsheet options would be welcome. Thank you all!

You can have a horse in an unlimited number of auto-filter barns (where the filtering occurs based on pre-set characteristics) but only one barn where you "manually" place the horse.

So set up all the specific auto-filter options you'll want first (ie: "TM Foals" "TM Yearlings", "all 2 y/os racers" "all 3 y/o racers") and think long and hard about the one manual characteristic you want that is useful for many or all your horses.

I have separate manual filters for foals bred by Kelly Haggerty for "layway", and out of mare leases from my assistant training gig, and I'm starting to track the foals I breed with a specific player in mare swaps (hi Ma!). For the remaining foals, I have a manual filter for breeding shed gallops. Because, **to me**, keeping an eye on the improvements to my race and breeding stock from other people is very important, and the breeding shed thing is because I lease them out.

You might have a completely different focus and you need to ask yourself "what is the little group of important things I want to track"? Why are you looking for a spreadsheet (or barns) in the first place, and what have you been forgetting about or overlooking?

There's also a neat feature where horses can automatically be filtered into new manual barns when they age up to a new barn (from foal to yearling, or yearling to racer).

Good luck, it's very useful.


PS - not saying you should use those auto-filters, they're just examples off the top of my head.

[Mark Castles]

I have a spreadsheet that has evolved over my 1 and half seasons on the sim... still bit primative and want to try to get it more user-friendly and less manual though during the break for s66. It includes a lot of what I think are key info and columns to filter similar to that already indicated above.

[Kelly Haggerty]

Newbie article idea. Maybe see if you can get one of the really large barns to do an interview about how they stay organized? I use custom barns somewhat, and the spreadsheet above, but still need to keep the racing barn at no more than about 150 or I just don't have enough time. I have wondered how the really big barns stay coordinated and I think it could make a great interview/article.

[Shannon Davis]

I’ve started with organizing my yearlings by division, which will be a game changer for next year and staying on top of training and workouts. Even with my small training barn, it was impossible to stay on top of them or to troubleshoot equipment.

I’ve divided up my racers some, with a lot of focus on dividing my paints from the other stock so I can more closely monitor them (and its by far my favorite division, followed closely by my miler stock.) So, now I’m just down to figuring out the best way to organize them to make entering/monitoring progress/scheduling a little easier.

The article idea is certainly something!! It seems that everyone does it just a little bit different and I’ve been able to make notes from everyone’s responses here as I try to navigate the way that works best. I live and breathe organization, so this is just a lot of fun to work through!

[Ma Springs]

I'm starting to track the foals I breed with a specific player in mare swaps (hi Ma!).

I have my own barn? How wow! ☺

I used to keep a spreadsheet in the beginning to keep track of my first 30-60 special claimer-allowance type horses, their division, gallop, some more things and a week by week entry schedule.

But OMG I was about to loose it in the beginning of my Junior season... a few hundred horses in different levels of unfitness, racing, training, improving. No, that was when I started using custom barns, and now I couldn't manage without them.

(I still put things in a spreadsheet at Festivus, I keep thinking about organizing my mares for leases or swaps. Someday...)

My racing barns have been adjusted a couple of times, but this has worked for some time now (no judging, I like it!):

0-STAKES Barn
1-NOW Barn (the rest of the enter every 2-3 weeks racers)
2-BLOOMING Barn (to keep the improvers fit)
22-Bloom gallop late Barn (to look for improvers during season)
3-2 yo mile route SC Barn
4-2yo Equipment Barn
4-Other training Barn 
5-Not assigned Barn* 
6-For sale Barn
All racers Barn*
Future MARES Barn* (to look at pretty thing)

The breeding barn is more difficult. Until recently I sorted my mares like "breed fillies" (the best ones), "breed colts" (the no expectations ones) and "wait to choose". But with better mares that is not really the way to operate anymore. Inspired by Jack's fine article I re-organized my mares, close to what he has. I like it in one way (I like organizing, and to put lables on things ), but it is not perfect. A mare that has produced one stakes and four solids, is she "worthy" of living in the stakes producing barn? I'd like to find some other way of sorting out "really nice" (nice breeding, blue hen, stakes producing), from "might be good" (stakes winner or better BSA comment or classy pedigree types), from "one more shot" and "only for sentimental value" and maybe "lease auction types" or something like that.

Have yet to find the perfect breeding barn set up. Looking forward to all those articles!

[Mary Whalen]

I've never used an outside spreadsheet, but I wouldn't be able to keep the number of horses I have if it wasn't for custom barns and being able to filter within those barns.

The barns I use are:
Actives in Training Barn - In Training For Sale Barn - Main Racing Barn - Broodmares Barn - Broodmares for Lease Barn - Future Sales Barn - Keeper Foals Barn - Stallion Barn - Main Training Barn - Yearlings For Sale Barn

After that I simply use the filter if I want to only see the turf routers in a barn or only all the two year olds. I have it set up too that as the year changes all horses filter into the correct barn. So if I don't sell as a yearling they move into the in training sale barn.