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Over the last year we’ve seen our customers starting to use the booking system in At The Yard to schedule riding lessons. To make this easier we’ve been periodically adding features to make using it for this scenario more effective. One example of this development is the Request system we implemented a while ago which allows a user to request a booking and for you to approve, deny or suggest an alternative.
When booking a riding lesson you also need to ensure that another facility (such as the outdoor school) is available at the same time (it’s not much good having a lesson if you’ve got nowhere to ride). Until now you’ve had to manually do this process, either by booking it before approving the request or by asking your customer to also request/book the necessary facilities when booking the lesson.
Whilst this has worked, it’s been an area that we’ve wanted to improve for a while. We want customers to just book the lesson and have all the dependencies booked automatically at the same time.
To make this possible we are today releasing the a feature called Composite Bookings.
Composite Bookings, literally meaning bookings made up of several parts, takes away the extra steps that have been involved in booking a lesson up-to now. It supports the ability to have multiple dependencies (e.g you can require the outdoor school and also for an instructor to be accessible) or simply just one dependency (e.g like a school in our original example).
Once setup, however simple or complicated your dependencies, it’ll automatically book everything needed. Your customers simply need to book the one thing they care about. In this case, the lesson!
This setup process only needs to be done once by the yard admin. It’ll define the relationships between different facilities. Each facility can be involved in multiple dependency chains (e.g. Both Lesson with Instructor #1 & Lesson with Instructor #2 can both depend on the Indoor School being free). The one restriction that we impose is that you cannot have loops in your dependencies (as show in the diagram) - but don't worry it’ll let you know if you try and form a loop.
To start the setup process go to Admin -> Facilities Note: You’ll need to create all your facilities before creating the dependancies. To setup the dependancies for a facility, click on Edit for the respective facility. On the dialog which opens, scroll down to the Dependant Facility section. To add a dependancy click on the Green + button. You can then select the dependancies for this facility (shown in the diagram below for our example “Lesson with Instructor Number 1”). This can be repeated as many times as necessary.
Once you’ve finished choosing the dependancies click on Update Facility. This will set your dependancies and from then on, in our example, any bookings for “Lesson with Instructor Number 1” will automatically make a corresponding booking for the School and for Instructor #1.
The process of making a composite booking as a customer/member/livery is exactly the same as they’re already used to. They just go to the booking screen, select what they want, choose a time and then click on book. The difference is it’ll book all the other required facilities at the same time.
This result is shown in the diagram on the right/above. You’ll note that there is no Cancel Booking on the automatically made bookings. They’ll be removed automatically if/when the Cancel Booking button is pressed on the primary booking (in this case Lesson with Instructor #1).
Reading this post you’ll notice that there are a few ‘inconsistencies’ in the way we use the term Facility(ies). For example whilst a Lesson would more logically be called a service we’re still calling it a facility. This discrepancy occurs because within At The Yard Services are typically date based (e.g. booking for a muck out for a date or a selection of dates) where as Facilities are time based (e.g. you have slots available to book and they select time from those slots). This discrepancy won’t cause issues for your users but we thought we’d note it here to remove any confusion that may arise when setting up.
The next enhancements to the booking system will be attaching a ‘booking schedule’ to each horse. This means you’ll also be able to ensure that the horse they’ll be using for a lesson will be available at the same time as a lesson. This is great for facilities which have horses available to use as part of a customers membership.
Check back soon for more updates or follow us on Facebook where we post notifications of updates to At The Yard.
You may not know that we take almost all of the photos that you see on our website, blog, and Facebook posts. We’re not professionals but it’s become a bit of a hobby and we’d like to share it with you.
We are very fortunate that our mare is an old hand at being a model for our pictures, and is either happy to stand and be photographed or in the worse case scenario, tries to use the equipment as an ear scratching post.
But whilst she is beautiful (ok, we may be a little bit biased) we enjoy having a variety of horses and ponies on our website. So how do you introduce horses of all ages to photography equipment in a safe and relaxed way?
The first concern is always the horse’s safety, physically and mentally. We tend to introduce them to the equipment in a sand school which has the added bonus that if any of the equipment gets knocked over it generally has a soft landing and doesn’t break. By being in an enclosed environment which is big enough for the horse to move completely away from the equipment if it feels stressed, we can ensure that there is never too much pressure on the horse to do something they are not comfortable with whilst keeping them contained which allows photos to be taken without a bridle or head collar.
This being said, every horse we have photographed has been very curious about the equipment and so far we’ve had no problems. We introduce the camera stands first as these are static and vaguely resemble a jump stand. Most horses aren’t troubled by these. The more challenging things to introduce are the umbrella, the flash, and the reflector, which is a large round circle of crinkled silver fabric. (See the photos below for a few examples of the setup process).
We introduce these items one at a time. We also find it can be helpful to have the horse loose in the sand school so that they can decide how close they want to be to the equipment. Most horses are surprisingly relaxed with it all, and some have been known to give the reflector a little nibble!
The first photos might only be ‘ok’ whilst you get the lighting setup right
We also try and introduce the flash in daylight/dusk so that it isn’t too intense when they first experience it. The photos taken with a black background are usually shot at night and this experience can be overwhelming for a horse if they haven’t seen all the equipment and experienced the flash in daylight first.
We try and give each horse at least one session to get use to the experience before we aim to take any usable photos. We also try and do the photo sessions at a time when no one has to rush off after a set time so that there is no pressure to get things “right”.
With a little work you’ll get the lighting just right (although no guarantee the ears will be forward).
If we found a horse was completely not ok with the process we would, of course, accept that not all horses want to be models for us and that’s completely alright. We are always prepared to accept not every session will result in a usable photo.
As we said, the welfare of the horse is always the most important thing to us, and the horse’s owner is always present throughout the session as photos are being taken. Also stressed horses look stressed, so we know that when we take care to help horses be calm and happy, it is reflected in the pictures.
These sessions are always a lot of fun, and all of our model horses are volunteers. Their owners get to keep all the photos we take for free and in return we use the pictures on our blog and Facebook posts for At The Yard.
If you’ve stumbled across this post and haven’t heard of At The Yard before please take a moment to visit our website and find our more. At The Yard is the game changing equine livery yard management app that we promise will save you time and money. Please visit our contact page and get in touch to find out more or follow us on Facebook to keep up to date with it’s progress or just to check out the latest photos.
P.S. The same general techniques also work well on cats. Although in the case of this photo he ended up sitting on the reflector and breaking it!!!
We’ve been hard at work for the last 6+ weeks working on introducing the ability to share horses between your customers in At The Yard. This latest feature represents significant changes throughout the system from subscriptions through to invoicing and much more. It’s moved us away from the one horse - one user paradigm we’ve had up to now.
We’re excited at the new opportunities this change of paradigm brings to our customers, both now and into the future with features coming down the pipeline.
Lets look at a few of the new scenarios you can now manage with At The Yard.
A common arrangement is for a livery to have one or more sharers for their horse. These sharers are generally responsible for feeding, grooming, mucking out and everything else that the horse might need on their days.
Whilst looking after the horse it’s likely that there will be costs for feeds or other supplies. The sharers can now be given their own account in At The Yard and be given permission to record these against the owners account. This will save further time for owners and the yard staff alike whilst further reducing the chance for charges to be forgotten or missed.
By having their own account they can also now book facilities and order services in their own right and receive invoices for them directly. Again, further simplifying the admin burden for both owners and the yard manager.
If your yard keeps a collection of horses that are made available to liveries, members or regular customers you can now represent this within At The Yard.
Once setup the horses will then appear to your users when booking facilities, lessons, cross county courses etc and allow the costs of these activities to be billed to their individual user accounts.
We hope this addition will allow yards to explore additional business models and revenue streams and offer new and exciting services to their customers.
Syndicate horses are owned by a collection of owners who both benefit from the horse as a group and cover the cost for the horse as a group.
With this latest update you can now support these arrangements in At The Yard. You can record the various stakes different members have in a horse and make the horse available to all the syndicate members.
Much like with the shared horses, described above, costs incurred whilst the yard or a syndicate member is looking after the horse can be billed directly to the horse’s own account.
And again, by having their own account they can also book facilities, order services that are for their individual sole benefit and have them billed to their own individual account and receive invoices for them directly.
Finally when it comes to invoicing, At The Yard will automatically calculate each member of the syndicate’s individual portion of the invoice they owe, based on the stake they have in the horse - whilst still showing them the overall invoice for the horse so they can see all the costs involved.
As always, all subscribers to At The Yard have already received this update. Throughout the system these options are now available. Over the coming week we’ll be releasing a collection of guides on how to setup each of the scenarios and also how to complete invoicing for syndicate horses. In the meantime if you’re looking to get this setup ASAP get in touch and we’d be happy to arrange a support call to guide you through the setup process.
Finally if you've stumbled across this page and have your own livery yard we'd love to show you more of At The Yard. Please visit our contact page and get in touch.
P.S. We know we missed this weeks #featurefocusfriday - we were aiming to have this ready for Friday but the final testing setup meant we slightly missed it. We’ll be back next week with another #featurefocusfriday.
A few weeks ago we added the ability to share horses; between liveries, to the whole yard or for a syndicate group of owners.
All the sharing options are setup in the management horse view. To get to this view go to the menu and click Management -> Yard Horses and click on Show on the horse you’re sharing.
Scroll down and find the Add Share button to set it up. On this page you’ll have all the sharing options in the system with which you can configure your shares. The rest of this post will look at the different sharing scenarios available to you.
This scenario is used when you have a livery on your yard who has a private sharer. You can set the sharer an account up and then share your liveries horse to the new sharers account. The sharer will then be able to book lessons, purchase products etc. with/for that horse.
This scenario can be used for yards which offer yard horses as part of a membership to the yard. Once setup every user at the yard can access the shared horse to book facilities (the school) or order services (a lesson) with/for that horse.
Syndicate horses are horses that are owned by a group of users. A key element of these horses is that everything involved in the horses upkeep must be billed to the horse and then split amongst the syndicate owners. When it comes to billing time At The Yard will automatically split the bill amongst the syndicates. Take a look at the video below to see how.
P.S. If you've stumbled across this page and have your own livery yard we'd love to show you more. At The Yard is the game changing equine livery yard management app that we promise will save you time and money. Please visit our contact page and get in touch.
Following on with our tradition of being late with #FeatureFocusFriday today (a Saturday 😂) we’re looking at how to change the size of the logo used on your invoices. It’s really quick and easy but can have a significant impact on the look of your invoices.
Move the slider back and forth to change the size of the logo. When you’re happy with it’s size click update.
