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At The Yard has a broad range of options to allow you to setup bookings for your facilities to run just the way you like. In this blog post we’ll be taking a look at all of them and explaining why and how you can use them.
If you are looking to setup your facility to be available to the public you’ll need to look at our guides on setting up your shop. This guide is purely for setting up facilities for bookings within your yard.
For some yards/facilities this section can be completely ignored. If you don’t charge your customers a fee for using your facilities you can leave it as is. However if there is a charge this section will allow you to configure all the options available.
The initial option is the standard price for the service (if you’re VAT registered you’ll see the options here to set the VAT code as well).
The price you set here will be the amount charged to your customer when their booking takes place (e.g. if booked on the 01/04/23 at 10:00 the charge will be raised on 01/04/23 at 10:00).
The next section is Subscription Dependent Pricing. This allows you to vary the price a customer will pay based on the subscriptions they have (e.g. if they have a certain livery package or a membership package you can offer them a reduced rate or allow them to use it for free).
To set this up you click on the plus button, chose the service to which they must have a subscription and set the discount. You can do this for as many different services you have, allowing you to create multiple levels of benefits to your users to fit the needs of your business.
We also support including a number of visits to a facility as part of livery or membership package. This can be configured once you’ve created your facility and instructions on how to do this can be found here.
Settings allows you to configure the overall availability and slot lengths throughout the day.
Start and end times dictate when the facility is open and closed. Booking length sets the length of the slots themselves and gap length sets an un-bookable gap between slots (great for giving time to tidy the school).
Handy Tip: With booking length it’s generally a good idea to keep this relatively small (15-30 minutes). Users are presented with a button when booking to extend their booking over multiple slots. Because of this keeping slot length small allows the most flexibility.
Restrictions are the opposite of settings. Where settings allow access, restrictions constrain users in certain ways to allow you to keep control over your facilities.
Minimum time before booking
Whatever time set here will stop users from booking (and cancelling) a slot in the facility in the defined period before a slot. By setting a sensible value here (e.g. 1 hour) it allows your customers to use an empty school without a booking (should you allow this) safe in the knowledge that no one can run in and book it when they’ve already started.
Maximum bookings per day
This is the maximum number of bookings per day across all your customers. For the majority of facilities this will be set to N/A.
Two examples as to when this can be used are:
1) To restrict uses of a certain facility to extend it’s serviceable life.
2) To only allow a certain number of bookings to be made a day whilst allowing the rest of the time to be left free for unbooked visits.
Maximum allowed bookings in a row
This sets how many slots an individual customer can book in a row. As above, if you combine this option with a short booking length you can allow customers to have flexibility to make longer booking whilst still stoping them from abusing it and booking a facility for the entire day.
Maximum allowed simultaneous bookings
This sets the maximum number of customers who can book a facility at the same time. (e.g. how many horses you’re allowed in a facility at once). This is great for increasing the utilisation of your facility and when combined with the social features (discussed next) can be an effective solution to allow multiple horses to use a facility at the same time.
This is a simple dropdown called ‘Enable Social Features?’. When enabled all login users (essentially everyone apart from guests booking via the shop feature) will be able to see who is in a particular slot and what they’re doing.
Defined uses allow you to predefine a set of uses for customers to choose from when making a booking. For example, you can predefine uses such as Schooling or Jumping. Then, when a booking is being made, people can choose from one of these predefined options to make it clear to others what they’re doing.
On top of this there are a few extra options for each defined use:
Exclusive Booking
If set, on selection of the defined use by a user an exclusive booking will be made for them (and will only be available to them if the slot is entirely free).
This can be useful, for example, when setting up a defined use for an external lesson where it would be necessary to have sole use of the facility.
Include Question This allows for a question to be added to a defined use. Following on with our example from above (an external lesson) we could ask at the time of booking for the name of the instructor they’re using.
This section allows you to define the facilities on which this facility depends. This allows for the creation of simple through to complex dependency structures - for more information on this read this article for more information on how to set it up.
The final section includes a number of additional options you can choose to check or not check depending on your needs.
As you can see facilities in At The Yard have a huge range of options to customise and tweak to allow you to match the way you work. With that said if you’re looking for a simple facility you can stick with the default options and get up and running straight away.
If you’re setting up a facility in your yard and want some help in getting it to work the way you want get in touch with our support who’ll be happy to help.
When someone in At The Yard makes a request, subscribes to a service or books a facility it’s important to inform staff so they can act accordingly. Until now we only offered one option to configure this for your yard - to turn the notifications on or off for all staff…
This worked, it made sure that everyone got the information they needed, but what if you wanted to stop notifications going to certain staff members. For example when:
Well today we’re making this possible. We’ve added a whole bunch of configuration options so you can use notifications the way you want to. From so granular that a single staff member can be assigned to a particular service through to the existing ‘message every member of staff’ that we’ve had until now.
Lets look at the options now available:
All these configuration options are done on the Yard Configuration screen under the Notification Settings section.
This is still the default option. So if this is what you want you’re already done!
Click on the Edit button. Tick the box “When a request is made in the system notify all members of staff?”
This option must be turned on for any staff to receive notifications with the other options.
This sets which staff will receive the staff notifications.
The existing options are shown in the Notification Settings pane and to make changes you can click on the Edit Staff Settings button. Simply tick/untick the appropriate staff members and click save.
This option works in combination with the previous option. It sets the defaults for new members of staff to ensure that they automatically receive the correct settings (one less thing to remember when onboarding new staff).
The final option gives you the finest control over who receives the notification, allowing only the user assigned to a service to receive the notification.
This is perfect for situations when a single member of staff is responsible for a particular service (for example Rug Washing or a Lesson with a particular member of staff). They can be set to receive all requests, manage approvals and confirm fulfilment whilst not adding additional clutter to the inboxes of users who are not involved.
To set this up simply enable the ‘If a service has been assigned to a user then only email them instead of all staff’ in the notification settings panel. Then existing assignments will automatically be used or you can create new ones via the Forecast panel or by going to Admin, Services and clicking the new option under the edit drop down called ‘Assign User to Service’.
To check on or remove existing assignments, these can be seen under the management menu tab by clicking on the assignments button.
We’ve recently introduced two new features that work together to give you more flexibility in the running of your yard and more insight into where you spend money on your yard.
Product groups allow you to build collections to be used within the existing Included Products System. Previously you could set an allowance for a single product to be included with a livery or membership package. With this update you can now set a number of items to be included from a group of products.
For example, you can now offer 7 bales of bedding per month, chosen from a selection of available bedding (such as shavings, straw or Miscanfus). Your customers can then pick a combination of 7 of these included within their product allowance. Any extra they use beyond this will automatically be charged to them.
Setting up product groups is easy. To get started go to the Admin menu and click on Products. From this page click on the Product Groups button at the top of the page (shown).
You can create as many product groups as you need and products can be included in as many different groups as needed.
As with the existing Included Product System you can now use the new product groups to make a certain quantity of products available as part of a subscription. They’re available in the same included products screen (accessed by going to the Admin menu and clicking on the Services button and then on the Edit button on the applicable service and finally on the Edit Included Products button). The product groups will always show at the top of the list of available items (shown below).
At The Yard features reporting for both historic purchases and service fulfilments. We’ve long had the ability to filter by date, user and product/service but we wanted to make more information available to yards.
This update brings enhancements to give you more information about your historical data including totals and breakdowns within your chosen search. These data points, when combined with the existing filtering, can be a powerful tool in analysing expenditure in terms of both money and time.
These reports are automatically shown to you at the bottom of Purchase History and Service History whenever you choose to filter by a service, product or group.
We’ve already seen yards use this data to support their business, but we’re always adding additional features to give you more insight into your yard. If you have an idea for a new report please get in touch.
Todays release includes a collection of Quality Of Life improvements to the invoicing system in At The Yard. These are designed to make your life that extra little bit easier each and every time you have to send your invoices. Individually they’ll save you few seconds but together and when repeated over every invoice they’ll save you a significant amount of time.
When you send an email regarding an invoice (this applies to new invoices sent from today) to your customers you can now see when and to which email address the notification was sent to.
In addition to this it’s now clearer on the invoice overview page if you’re sending an email regarding an invoice for the first time or if you’re sending a reminder.
When you record a payment on an invoice you now have the option to show the payment on the invoice itself and update the remaining amount owed for that invoice.
This setting is off by default. To enable this option go to Yard Configuration and click on Edit Invoice Settings. You’ll see an option called Show payments on invoice which you can check to enable this setting.
We’ve created a new option in Invoice Fields called Invoice Mid Text. This option allows you to include a short piece of text after the contents of the invoice but above the footer. This is ideal for including payment information directly on the invoice but you can, of course, use it for whatever you choose.
Barn names are available in At The Yard to record the formal name of the horse but display the name they’re known by day to day.
We’ve now added a new option available under Invoice Options to use the horses Barn Name when creating an invoice.
When creating an invoice you sometimes want to make a simple change to the text or price of the item. By visiting the Charges screen under the admin menu you can now click edit on any charge that has not yet been invoiced and make the needed changes.
We’re adding an additional option to the Invoice Grouping Options called Month of charge. This allows you to group similar items on an invoice by the month they’re in. This is in addition to the existing option Date of Charge which allows you to group similar items on an invoice irrespective of the date (or month) they’re in.
When you’re creating a new invoice it’s common practice to send out a months worth of charges at a time. However if you’re running a few days behind this can be a frustrating experience as you’ll have to manually deselect any additional charges that have been raised in the meantime.
The Select By Month Buttons
To help with this we’ve added buttons at the bottom of the invoice preview to automatically select all the charges for a specific month whilst deselecting everything else. Making what could have been 10’s of clicks into a single click!
A Required Service Option (previously known as a parent service) allows you to restrict a service you offer through the use of subscriptions.
Much like Subscription Dependant Pricing this can be used to tailor offerings to your different customers. Unlike Subscription Dependent Pricing this service allows you to completely hide non applicable services from customers rather than just changing their pricing.
This can be useful, for example, when you have different types of customers on your yard (e.g. DIY & Full Livery). For each type of customer you will have different services you want to offer to them and now with this feature you can reflect this in At The Yard.
This has been possible up to now with the existing parent service feature however it limited you to choosing one type of subscription to restrict your service to. Today we’re launching an expansion on this feature allowing multiple required service options to be added for each service making it overall more useful and more flexible.
For example previously you could have Exercise restricted to only those with a Full Livery subscription. This was fine until you want to make it available to other types of livery (e.g. part livery). With todays release you can now make exercise available to as many types of livery as you want while still restricting it to some.
Setup takes place in the Admin Services View. You can either create a new service or make changes to an existing one. Every service will have a new panel called ‘Required Service Options’, this replaces the existing drop down called ‘Parent Service’.
From here you can add as many option for required services as you wish. In this example we’re making the service available to those who have either Full Livery or DIY Livery.
Your customers will automatically see which services are available to their horse(s). This works even if their horses have different livery types or subscriptions.
As you can see in the above example we have used this feature to make services available to some of the customers’ horses but not all of them.
Ebony (the horse) has a subscription to a Full Livery Package and so has access to book in lessons. Where as their others horses (shown under all horses) have access to all the other services your offer (along with Ebony).