Treat a Whole Pen at Once: Inside the Batch Protocol Wizard

Hospital pens, mass treatment days, processing follow-ups — they all involve giving the same protocol to a group of animals at the same time. The Batch Protocol Wizard in FLS Cloud lets you record a protocol against an entire pen, lot, or hand-picked subset in three simple steps. Here's how it works.

Why we built it

When a vet writes a treatment for "every steer in Pen 14," nobody wants to open each animal's medical screen one at a time. The wizard collapses that work into a single guided flow: pick the population, fill in the protocol once, review the cost, submit. One round trip for the whole group, with the same audit trail you'd get from per-head entry.

To launch, go to Medical → Cattle Protocol Wizard. 

Step 1 — Pick the Population

The first screen is built around three fields that work together:

• Protocol Date — the date the treatment or processing event will be recorded against.
• Lot — searchable dropdown of every lot with live animals (with head count).
• Pen — searchable dropdown of every pen with live animals (with head count).

Lot and Pen filter each other automatically. Pick a lot first and the Pen list narrows to pens holding that lot; pick a pen first and the Lot list narrows to lots in that pen. Use either, both — whatever matches how you're thinking about the group that day.

The animal grid below shows every animal that matches your filters, with ID, VID, Type, Inducted status, induction/withdrawal dates, EID, and color. It defaults to select all. A live "X head selected" counter sits between the form and the grid so you always know what's in scope.

When you're happy with the selection, click Next.

Step 2 — Enter the Protocol

This is the working screen and it's laid out for chute-side speed:

• Population label confirms the head count you brought from Step 1.
• New Pen — optional pen transfer that happens together with the protocol.
• Weight — extra-large input so you can tap a number from across the pen.
• Temperature and Chute Charge — recorded against the protocol.
• Diagnosis drives Variation (cascade dropdown) — the variation list is filtered to only what's valid for the chosen diagnosis.
• Pen Checker and Technician — pulled from your employee list.

Below those, the Items grid lets you add drugs row by row. Click Add Row, pick the item, enter the amount; unit, cost, price, total, and withdrawal period populate from the catalog automatically. Reorder, delete, or edit rows in place.

Two safeguards run quietly behind the scenes:

• If your settings require it, the wizard refuses to advance when a drug's withdrawal date would push past the animal's shipping date.
• The picked variation can be auto-applied if your feedlot setting prefers always-default variations — one less click per batch.

Step 3 — Review the Cost Summary

A clean preview panel shows exactly what's about to be written:

• Date, Population, Cost/Head, and Total Cost.

This is the moment to catch a wrong drug or a stray decimal. Click Back if anything looks off, or Submit to commit.

On submit, the wizard:

1. Creates a CattleProtocol record per selected animal, keyed to the chosen date and variation.
2. Saves all drugs at the catalog's current cost and price.
3. Decrements drug inventory.
4. Recalculates withdrawal dates and rolls the new pen assignment through if you provided one.
5. Updates each animal's last-processed or last-treated date depending on the protocol type.

A confirmation page wraps things up so you can move on.

The bottom line

What used to be a per-head loop is now a three-screen wizard: choose the group, fill the protocol once, review the cost, done. Less typing at the chute, fewer errors, faster throughput, and a complete medical record on every animal involved.

Open Medical → Batch Protocol Wizard the next time you're treating a group.

Not using FLS Cloud yet? Feedlot Solutions provides the most comprehensive, cloud-based management software for the modern beef producer. From inventory and health records to precise feed billing and custom reporting, we help you measure it so you can manage it.

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Keywords: Feedlot management software, cattle record keeping, custom feedlot reporting, beef production data, FLS Cloud, cattle performance analysis.

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