Three ways a UK livestock farm can handle its paperwork today: Herdwatch, the established compliance app; spreadsheets and an accountant, the default most farms already run; and FarmHQ, a new, pre-launch attempt to do compliance and the money in one place. Here is an honest look at what each one actually is.
Herdwatch is a real, established livestock compliance app used by roughly 22,000 farmers across the UK and Ireland, and it does that job well. What it does not do is bookkeeping, VAT coding, invoicing or Making Tax Digital filing, so a farmer using Herdwatch still needs a completely separate accounting product and an accountant to handle the money side of the farm. FarmHQ is being built to do both livestock compliance and the money in one app. That is a genuine structural difference, not a maturity claim: FarmHQ is pre-launch, in beta as of August 2026, with no live product yet, so weigh that honestly against Herdwatch's track record before deciding anything.
These three options are not really competing on the same axis. One is a mature compliance product, one is a long-standing manual process, and one is a new product being built around a different idea of what should sit in a single app. Here is what each of them covers today.
Herdwatch is a mobile-first app built specifically for UK and Ireland livestock compliance. It handles cattle and sheep registration and movement reporting, working with BCMS and LIS on the compliance side, and it produces Red Tractor style audit reports so a farm can pull its paperwork together ahead of an inspection. In 2025 it added Herdi, a herd-scoped AI assistant that can answer questions against a farm's own herd records. Roughly 22,000 farmers use it, which is a meaningful number and a sign the compliance side of the product genuinely works day to day, through real calving and lambing seasons, not just in a demo. What it does not touch is money: no bookkeeping, no VAT, no invoicing, no Making Tax Digital filing. For that, a Herdwatch farm needs a second, separate product.
This is the default a large share of UK farms are actually running today, not through any particular preference but because it is what was always there. Compliance records live in a mix of paper diaries, a spreadsheet, or whatever system the last person who did the paperwork happened to set up. The money side runs through a traditional accountant relationship: receipts collected in a folder or a shoebox, handed over at year end or quarterly, and turned into accounts and a VAT return by someone the farm pays for their time. It works, in the sense that farms have run this way for decades, but it depends heavily on one or two people's diligence, it duplicates effort between the compliance records and the accountant's books, and it costs real money in fees on top of the hours spent gathering and handing over the paperwork.
FarmHQ is a new entrant, currently in beta and recruiting founding farms for a South-West England pilot as of August 2026. It has no live public product yet: no App Store or Play Store listing, no history of farms running it through a full year of seasons, no track record to point to. What it is built to do, once live, is combine livestock compliance (births, movements, deaths, the medicine book, Red Tractor records) with the money (receipt capture, VAT coding, invoicing, Making Tax Digital filing) in one app, with an AI assistant, Ask Farmer Joe, that can see both the animals and the accounts and draft entries a farmer taps to confirm before anything is filed or posted. That combination, one product covering both sides of the farm office, is the entire premise of FarmHQ. It is a statement about what is being built, not yet a claim about maturity.
Credit where it is due: Herdwatch is a serious, working product, not a prototype. Around 22,000 farmers using it day to day through calving, lambing and movement season is not a small number, and it means the rough edges that show up only after real use, in patchy signal, in a muddy yard, with cold hands on a phone screen, have mostly already been found and fixed. A few things stand out.
None of that is faint praise. If all a farm needs is livestock compliance, Herdwatch is a proven way to get it, and this guide is not written to argue otherwise.
The gap is specific and consistent: Herdwatch does not do bookkeeping, VAT coding, invoicing or Making Tax Digital filing. Nothing in the product touches the money side of the farm at all. In practice this means a Herdwatch farm is running two separate systems side by side, Herdwatch for the animals, and a completely different accounting product for the VAT return, the invoices, and the MTD filing to HMRC.
Two separate systems means two separate places to enter the same underlying event. A vet visit produces a medicine book entry in one app and an invoice or expense line in another, typed in twice through two different routes, with no link between them. There is no way, inside Herdwatch, to ask what a TB test cost per head, because the cost lives in the accounting product and the test lives in Herdwatch, and the two never talk to each other. This is not a criticism of how well Herdwatch does what it does. It is a description of what it was built to do, and money was never part of the brief.
Running compliance on paper or a spreadsheet alongside a traditional accountant is not free, even though it can feel that way because the costs are spread out and mostly invisible day to day. Typical accountancy fees for a working farm sit somewhere between £800 and £2,000 a year, and that is before adding a bookkeeper's time, a farm secretary's hours, or the farmer's own evenings spent chasing receipts and reconciling a spreadsheet against a bank statement.
The fee is the visible cost. The bigger one is usually time: gathering paperwork for the accountant, correcting the inevitable gaps in a spreadsheet kept between other jobs, and re-entering the same information more than once because the compliance record and the accounts were never designed to share data. None of that shows up on an invoice, but it is real hours taken from the yard. If you are weighing up whether to change anything at all, it is worth reading what to look for in farm software before picking a direction, because the right answer depends on how much of this cost is fees versus time, and that varies farm to farm.
FarmHQ is pre-launch. As of August 2026 there is no live public app, no App Store or Play Store listing, and no farms that have run a full year of seasons through it, so there are no user reviews to point to and no years of reliability to weigh against Herdwatch's track record. That is worth saying plainly rather than glossing over, because a comparison that pretended otherwise would not be an honest one.
When FarmHQ is live, pricing runs across three tiers: Stockman at £29.99 a month, Farm Office at £99 a month, and Headquarters at £150 a month, plus a custom Enterprise option for larger operations. None of that has been tested at scale yet either. Anyone weighing this up should treat FarmHQ's compliance and bookkeeping claims as a description of what is being built, not a guarantee of what has already shipped.
There is not a single right answer here, because it depends on what a farm actually needs today versus what it is willing to help build. If the only requirement is solid livestock compliance, Herdwatch is a real product, working today, used by tens of thousands of farmers, with a freemium model that costs nothing to try. Pairing it with a separate accounting product and an accountant, or running spreadsheets and an accountant on their own, is a perfectly workable way to run a farm, and it is what most farms already do.
FarmHQ is for a different kind of farm: one that wants compliance and the money handled by a single product instead of two, is comfortable being early, and is willing to join a beta rather than wait for a finished, reviewed, multi-year product. For a browse through the wider set of statutory rules and paperwork this all sits inside, the farm paperwork guides are a reasonable place to start. And if joining early sounds right for your farm, the founding farms pilot is open now.
No. As of August 2026, FarmHQ is pre-launch and in beta, with no App Store or Play Store listing and no farms that have run it through a full year of seasons. It is recruiting founding farms for a South-West England pilot, with three months free for those who join early.
Herdwatch is a livestock compliance app: registrations, movements and Red Tractor style audit reports, with a herd-scoped AI assistant called Herdi. It does not do bookkeeping, VAT or Making Tax Digital, so a Herdwatch farm needs a separate accounting product. FarmHQ is being built to combine livestock compliance and the money, receipts, VAT, invoicing and MTD filing, in one app.
No. Herdwatch focuses on livestock compliance and does not offer bookkeeping, VAT coding, invoicing or Making Tax Digital filing. Farmers using Herdwatch pair it with a separate accounting product for the money side of the farm.
Accountancy fees for a working farm typically run between £800 and £2,000 a year, before adding a bookkeeper's or farm secretary's time, or the hours a farmer spends gathering receipts and maintaining a spreadsheet.