What it is
An assessment is one farm's data for one reporting year, for one type of assessment. It is the unit ODOS calculates from: you fill it in, submit it, and that farm gets a result for that year.
Reporting years are calendar years.
Carbon is one assessment type among several — the others are Animal Welfare, Land Intelligence and General Farm use.
A farm can hold one assessment of each type per year, and no more. One farm, one year, one type is always a single assessment, so carbon and animal welfare for the same farm and year sit side by side and neither overwrites the other.
How an assessment gets created
There are three routes, and they all produce the same thing:
- New Assessment on Assessment Management, where you choose the farm, the year and the type.
- The Year column in a bulk upload. One row per farm per year, so a farm listed three times with three years arrives with three assessments. See Add multiple farms.
- The Assessments tab of a farm's detail page. Select New and choose the year and the type, or select the plus at the intersection of a year and a type to create that one directly.
If you create an assessment for a farm, year and type that already exists, ODOS opens the existing one rather than starting a second.
What the statuses mean
Each assessment carries a status. You see it in the type's column on the Farm Assessments table, and on the Assessments tab of the farm's detail page, which lists one row per year with a column for each assessment type. Select an existing assessment there to open it.
Status | What it means |
Not started | The assessment exists but nothing has been entered yet. Assessments created by bulk upload start here. |
In progress | Someone has entered data and it has not been submitted. A completed assessment also returns to this status once you change something in it. |
Completed | The assessment has been submitted and has a result. Reopening it does not change the status until you actually change something. |
Needs reprocess | ODOS gets in touch with you to agree what happens. There is nothing for you to do. |
Why it matters for your results
A result belongs to an assessment, not to a farm. One farm with four reporting years has four assessments and four results, which is what makes it possible to follow a farm's progress from year to year.
A completed assessment stores the result it produced. Changing the farm's details afterwards does not restate it — the new details apply from the next submission onwards.
Submitting again after a change produces a new result and replaces the old one. What you see is always the latest. View history on an assessment tracks changes to the data, not past results.
An assessment has to be Completed before its result appears anywhere. A farm sitting at Not started or In progress is absent from reporting for that year, which is worth checking before you close a reporting cycle.
Key terms
- Assessment — one farm, one reporting year, one assessment type.
- Assessment type — the kind of assessment being run. Carbon is one of several.
- Reporting year — the calendar year the data covers.
- Submit — the action that turns entered data into a result and moves the assessment to Completed.