Every horse that shows, travels, or changes yards carries a small stack of paperwork with it. There is the Coggins, the passport, and the record of whatever boosters your vet has given. Most of the time these papers sit quietly in a folder in the tack room or a drawer in the kitchen, and nobody thinks about them until a show secretary, a transporter, or a border official asks to see them. That is often the moment an owner finds out that one of them ran out a fortnight ago.
Nothing dramatic causes it. A date is printed on a sheet of paper, the paper goes into a drawer, and the months go by. Then a lapsed date costs you an entry you had already paid for, or a journey you had planned the whole week around. Hoofprint, a horse care diary for farrier, vet and health records, gives those dates somewhere to live other than the drawer, and gives you a Coggins expiry reminder before the paper runs out rather than after.
Three dates that travel with a horse
For owners who move horses around, three dates tend to matter more than the rest. The first is the Coggins, the blood test for equine infectious anemia that many shows, boarding barns, and state lines in the US ask to see. The second is the passport, the identification document that goes with a horse in many countries, along with any date on it that a journey or an event depends on. The third is the booster, meaning whichever vaccinations an event or a yard wants to see recorded as current.
How long each of these lasts is a question this article leaves alone, and for good reason. It depends on where you live, where you are going, and what you are entering. A state, a country, a breed society, and a single show can each have their own rules, and those rules change from time to time. Your vet knows the local picture and decides what your horse needs. The event or the journey sets out what it will accept. Hoofprint makes neither decision. It keeps the date you give it and reminds you as that date gets close.
In the US, many owners would describe this as keeping an eye on their Coggins expiration. Elsewhere people talk about expiry dates or renewal dates. Whatever you call it, the job is the same: knowing what the paper says before someone at a gate or a show office points it out to you.
Getting the date out of the drawer
The first step is the plain one. When a paper arrives, you read the expiry date printed on it and enter that date in Hoofprint. The app works from your paperwork, so the date you see later is the one your vet, the lab, or the issuing office actually wrote down. If a paper does not show a date clearly, ask whoever issued it rather than guessing.
It also helps to keep a picture of the document with the record. Hoofprint lets you attach photos from your camera or library, so a photo of the paper itself can sit alongside the date. If the original is in the trailer or at a friend's yard, you still have something to look at when you need the vet's name or a reference number. Whether an organiser will accept a photo in place of the original is their call, so it is worth carrying the paper as well.
Those details live with the rest of the horse's history rather than on a separate list. The app keeps eight record types, from vaccinations and egg counts to weight and medication, so the papers sit in the same diary as the everyday care you already note down. Version 1.0.1, released on 19 August 2026, also added the vaccination brand, the lot number, and who gave it. Those details are on the paperwork your vet hands over, and copying them in once saves a search through old envelopes later.
A warning before it lapses
Once the date is in, you no longer have to rely on a note pinned to the feed room door. The current description puts it simply: "Expiry dates for Coggins, passports, and boosters, with a warning before they lapse." That is the heart of a Coggins expiry reminder, and the reason to bother entering the date at all.
Version 1.0.1, released on 19 August 2026, introduced the warning with a note that is worth quoting in full:
Add an expiry to a Coggins test, a passport, or a booster, and Hoofprint warns you 30 days ahead — before it costs you a show or a journey, not after.
Thirty days is the lead time in that version 1.0.1 note. It tells you when the warning arrives, and nothing about how long a test or a booster stays valid, which remains a matter for your vet and for the rules of wherever you are headed. What a month does give you is room to call the vet and sort things out calmly, instead of discovering the problem the night before an entry closes.
The warnings are not the only way to look ahead. A month calendar shows everything that's due, at a glance, which is a useful view to check before a busy run of shows or a long trip. The reminders Hoofprint keeps for farrier, vaccination, deworming, dental, vet & custom sit in the same diary, so the paperwork and the ordinary rhythm of the yard are in one place.
When a reminder has served its purpose, you can mark a reminder done right from the notification. Once the new paper is in hand, enter its expiry date the same way you did the first, and the next warning will be waiting for the next renewal.
Handing papers to a vet or an event
Sooner or later someone else needs to see the record. A new vet may want the vaccination history, a yard manager may ask for a current Coggins before a horse arrives, and a transporter will want to know the passport is in order before loading.
For the vet, Hoofprint can export the record as a PDF, and that export is part of Pro. In version 1.1.0, released on 4 October 2026, the vet PDF now includes vaccine lot numbers and expiry dates. That puts the details you copied from the paperwork into one document you can pass along, instead of reading numbers out one at a time.
For an event or a journey, check what the organiser or the official will accept, and bring the originals if they ask for them. Hoofprint is there so you know your dates are current before you set off, and so a photo of each paper is close by if you need to check a detail on the way.
None of this depends on a good signal at the showground. Hoofprint works fully offline, and everything stays on your device and your own iCloud. There is no account, no signup, no tracking, no ads, which suits records that are nobody's business but yours and your vet's.
When a new paper arrives
The habit that makes all of this work is a small one. Each time the vet leaves, or a document comes back in the post, take a couple of minutes before the paper goes into the drawer and note these things:
The expiry date exactly as it is printed on the paper, not a date you have worked out yourself.
A photo of the paper, attached to the record, so the details are with you even when the original is not.
Which horse the paper belongs to, which matters more than it sounds if two of your horses have similar names or markings.
Who to check with if anything is unclear: your vet for what your horse needs, and the event's or the journey's own rules for what they will accept.
Done that way, a renewal stops being something you hope to remember and becomes a date you hear about with time to spare. The papers can stay in the drawer where they have always been. You simply stop relying on the drawer to tell you when they run out.
This article was drafted with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor before publishing.