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!
