Nothing is sent anywhere from this page. Shelter Animals Count and Best Friends both take the file as an upload inside your own portal account, so RescueConsole never holds a login for either of them.
Choosing the month
Pick the Month and Year at the top. The page opens on last month, which is the one you are usually filing. Everything below is counted fresh each time you change the month, from the records as they stand now. If you correct an intake date next week, the file you build after that is corrected too.Questions only you can answer
Most of the file comes straight from your records. Three things cannot, and the page asks about them. Each answer is remembered, so a question asked this month is not asked again.What one of your own outcomes counts as
Shelter Animals Count counts outcomes in a fixed list of their own: Adoption, Returned to owner, Transferred out, Returned to field, Died in care, Lost in care, Shelter euthanasia. The statuses RescueConsole starts you with line up with that list, so nothing is asked about Adopted, Returned to Owner, Return to Field (TNR), Euthanized, Died in Care or Missing / Escaped. A status you added yourself is asked about, because only you know what it means. “Barn Placement” could be an adoption, a transfer or a return to field. You can also answer Not an intake or an outcome they count, which is a real answer and a different one from leaving it alone. A status such as “Transport Hold” is neither.Where a transfer went
Shelter Animals Count counts a transfer to or from an agency in your state, out of state and international separately. RescueConsole records that an animal was transferred, not where the other agency is, so it asks once and remembers.How many animals were in your care
RescueConsole does not record when a status changed, so it cannot work out how many animals you had on the first of the month. You enter it once.
The count at the end of the month is not asked for. It is worked out the way Shelter Animals Count works it out themselves: the count at the start, plus everything that came in, minus everything that left.
Only a question with animals behind it this month is asked. If you have never transferred an animal, you are never asked where your transfers went.
The figures
One row per species, with what came in, what left and the count at each end of the month.
An animal’s age is counted on the day it happened, so one taken in at three months and adopted at seven is a young intake and an adult outcome. An animal with no date of birth is counted under Age unknown rather than guessed at.
An animal in the bin is left out, as it is in every other report.
Species Shelter Animals Count does not have
Shelter Animals Count counts eight species. Fish and Exotic / other are not among them, so animals of those species are in none of these figures. The page says so under the table when you have any. Barnyard animals and large mammals are both counted as farm animals, in one row.Downloading the file
Download the file is off until every question above has an answer, and the page says how many are still open. This is deliberate: an upload replaces whatever was already filed for that month, so a file with a gap in it would overwrite a good month with a worse one. The file is a CSV named for the month, such asshelter-animals-count-2026-01.csv.
Upload it yourself:
1
Shelter Animals Count
Sign in to your own Shelter Animals Count account, open Data, then CSV Upload, choose the file and submit it.
2
Best Friends' Shelter Pet Data Alliance
Sign in to shelterpetdata.org, open Manage Data, then the Monthly Data tab, and Upload Record. It is the same file.