Can you believe the first week of 2020 is already over. We’re determined to get the year off with a bang so we’re excited to be announcing our first feature release of the year - Included Facilities Schemes.
This feature allows you to manage the included facility usage you get as part of a livery/membership package. This brings it inline with the existing feature that allowed you to manage the included services.
How to setup?
We built this system on top of our previous work with service allowances and so it works in a very similar way. This means if you’re used to setting up the services that come included with your livery package you’ll find setting up included facilities quick and easy.
The first step is going to Admin → Services on the menu. Once there find the livery package you want to add a facility allowance to and then click on the edit drop down button. Find the ‘Edit Included Facilities Schemes’ button. Clicking this will bring up an overview of the existing facility allowances you have setup (shown below).
You’ll see all the existing schemes and the details of them. You can either click on Edit to make changes or click on New Included Facility Scheme to create a new allowance. This will bring up the scheme type selection screen which will allow you to choose the type of scheme that suits your needs. Once you’ve decided click on the ‘Create Scheme’ and you’ll be taken to the setup screen where you can fill in the details of the allowance.
The Scheme Type Selection Screen
The setup screen for a Week Allowance Scheme
You can create as many schemes as you need to allow you to encapsulate all the included facilities you offer as part of a package. The best part? Once setup it’ll just work. It’ll track everything for you either billing (or not billing) your customers as necessary.
As the year and indeed the decade draws to an end we’ve been taking some time to look back at At The Yard in 2019, all the features we’ve released and our highlights from the year.
Going International - We launched At The Yard to our first international customer in 🇦🇺🇦🇺Australia🇦🇺🇦🇺. Bringing the best of what we share in common from our UK experience and building new features to meet the specific needs in Australia. We’ve since added 🇳🇴🇳🇴Norway🇳🇴🇳🇴 in Beta and are always looking for new customers and new countries to expand to.
Shared, Syndicate and Yard Horses brought an expansion to the types of horse ownership structures we supported. Significantly we added support for syndicates along with the ability to automatically invoice them according to their ownership share.
Invoice Improvements
Logo Size allowed yards to further customise their invoices by changing the size of their logo on the invoice - a small but effective change.
Invoice Grouping - Different yards have different needs when it comes to their invoicing. One example of this is how to group similar items on an invoice. To support this we introduced options on how and when to group these items.
Track Staff Working Hours & Generating Time Sheets - As the poet John Donne once said “No Man is an Island”. This is very much the case for livery yards and so we introduced the ability to easily track staff work hours and generate timesheets. Another feature we introduced to further reduce the time our customers have to spend on admin.
Composite Bookings - This was a big one for us. It allowed yards to explicitly define rules around bookings that were previously only implicit. All this whilst still keeping things really easy for their users. We were delighted to get it launched as it meant that the system would, for example, guarantee both the arena and an instructor were available at the time of booking without the customer having to do any extra work. This means less confusion, less cancelled bookings and so better customer satisfaction!
Third Party Payment Requests - As a yard owner who offers an attendance service (such as with the farrier) you’ll often end up being the one who receives the request for payment from a third party for your customer. Whilst this isn’t yours to pay you can easily find your self chasing people to make sure the customers both received it and paid it! To support this we built a system so you can log the request, notify the customer and track when it’s been paid all from within At The Yard.
Yard Wide Display of Orders and Bookings & Yard Events - On a busy yard it’s important to be able to share significant orders, bookings and events to everyone on the yard. To support this we allowed yards to make orders of certain services, bookings of certain facilities and certain events to everyone on the yard. For example, this could be used to share the free call out day of your local vet to save everyone time and money.
Published Calendars - We took our first step into the public side of running a yard. With this feature you can select certain facilities availability to publish on your website for everyone to see. With it we started building a platform to support more of this side of things in 2020.
Introducing Rotas - Rotas are part of yard life. From poo picking fields through to sweeping the yard it’s important to know who is responsible for what. Be it a staff member or a livery on a DIY yard - this feature allows you to share the rota with everyone.
Improvements to Payments - In 2019 we made significant changes to the way we track payments in At The Yard. It allowed for tracking multiple payments for one invoice and storing much more information on how the payment was made and when. This also made it possible to start building integrations with accounting platforms such as Xero (see below).
Xero Integration - Whilst officially still in BETA, we are very proud of our Xero integration. It helps make staying compliant with your tax obligations quick and easy by pushing payments, contacts & invoices between At The Yard (ATY) & Xero. When setup, reconciling payments from your liveries in both ATY and Xero can be as easy as clicking 1 button.
Service Assignments - This feature allows you to assign individual service requests to a member of staff, contractor or anyone on the yard. This is great for making sure only staff with the appropriate skills are assigned to complete a task. It also allows you to further refine the work lists At The Yard generates.
Rich Text & Images in Horse Database - We made some foundational changes to the horse database system to allow customers to start storing much more information in it. From images of the horse through to free form text you have much more flexibility. All this means you can now keep your customers more informed with additional information than ever.
The Activity Log - With the ever increasing features and information At The Yard can present to your customers we wanted to introduce a single area where a customer could get an overview of everything happening with their horse. To make this possible we built the Activity Log. It means you can now scroll through and see every service and Horse Database update for a horse in a given time period. We’re going to be adding to this going forward making it increasingly useful as time goes on.
There were lots of other little changes, bug fixes and improvements made throughout the year which didn’t make the cut here or in our other blog posts but they all contributed to expanding and improving At The Yard for our customers.
Our View of The Arena at the Wellington Country Fair & Horse Trials
A highlight for us this year was attending our first show, the Wellington Country Fair & Horse Trials in August. It was great meeting and talking to lots of you as well as spending time with some or our professional colleagues who provide other services to the equine community.
It was also one of the hottest days of the year so we certainly put in the sweat equity over the three days - but we didn’t complain as we also had a brilliant view of the arena and the excellent show jumping that was going on in it.
Our Mare
Like a lot of you we spent a lot of time at the yard. In particular with our mare and unofficial ‘mascot’ who tirelessly poses for lots of our photos and marketing materials. As she enters her 26th year going strong we continue to enjoy every day with her.
With the start of the new year and new decade we couldn’t be more excited about what we’ve got planned for At The Yard. We can’t wait to share it all with you.
See you in 2020. We wish you all a fantastic new year!
To all our customers around the world Happy Christmas! We truly love working with all of you. Spend some well deserved time with your loved ones (both 2 and 4 legged)!
Today we’re excited to announce our latest new feature called The Activity Log. The Activity Log will help owners keep up to date with completed services, updates and any changes about their horse all in one place and at a moments notice.
In our last blog post we introduced Rich Text & Images into the horse database. The activity log makes full use of this allowing you to publish updates with images to your customers so they can easily keep track of the latest information about their horse.
The screenshot below gives you an overview of what your customers can come to expect when viewing the Activity Log for their horses.
To make life simple the log supports filtering to allow you to focus on either Services or Updates and you can quickly and easily jump through dates to review past log entries.
As we go forward we’ll be adding additional log entry types as we introduce new features. This will ensure it will remain the place to go for the latest about your (or your customer’s) horses.
Today we’ve released an update to the Horse Database.
This update allows you to store Rich Text and images in the horse database (much like you’ll be used to in any word processor etc).
To explain how it works and what you can do with it we’ve made a quick video:
We think this new feature will let you better update your customers and keep more comprehensive records. For example you can:
Provide in-depth reports and images to owners about the work your doing with the horse.
Keep a timeline of a horse on Rehab Livery as their condition improves.
Upload copies of reports by trusted partners like Dentists & Chiropractors.
We’re sure you’ll find lots of other uses we could never think of. We can’t wait to see what you do with it. As always if you have any questions or suggestions please get in touch!
