Blog
Last year we introduced Composite Bookings to At The Yard which allowed you to setup the links between your facilities and resources (e.g. an arena and an instructor). Since then we’ve introduced service ordering by calendar view which lets you have your services (like lessons) be bookable on a calendar.
These two updates brought with them a big leap in the usability of services in At The Yard. They did this whilst also making the ordering process much much quicker. Before the updates you or your customer needed to go and separately book the arena for the lesson to take place in and then book the lesson itself. This took longer and was prone to errors. With the changes it became a one step process - order the lesson and have At The Yard take care of everything else for you.
However it still had it’s limitations, what if you had more than one arena and you were happy for the lesson to take place in any of them? With the old system this wasn’t possible and you had to revert to the manual multi-step method - something we were not happy with and so we are excited to have launched this update which expands on our previous work, making this and so much more possible.
To facilitate this involved a complete rewrite of how we calculate availability and process bookings in At The Yard. In doing so we not only added this feature but put together robust system which can be built on in the future.
The key visible change to you and your customers is the ability to make those choices at the time of ordering/booking. Like everything in At The Yard it’s quick and simple, involving a single tap of a button. Once you’re done the system goes away and does all the hard work for you.
The changes to the booking/ordering screens that your customers see are relatively small. However one significant change is that on the calendar booking screen they now see a preview of availability that takes into account all of the linked services and facilities.
In the example shown below both the schools in which the lesson could take place have been booked during the first slot on Monday and so the slot show 0 / 1 bookings. This is because, whilst there is no lesson booked for that slot, it is still unavailable as none of the schools are available at that time.
When a customer chooses an available slot they’ll be met with the familiar order/booking screen. Now along with the choice of horse they’ll see a new option allowing them to choose which school they want to use (shown below):
We’ve shown a very simple example here. But should you have multiple layers of dependencies (e.g. a choice between indoors or outdoors and then a further choice from multiple indoor and outdoor schools) the user will be presented with the needed questions one by one as they give their answers.
In this way you can have complex multilayer dependencies for your services (which can be as simple or complicated as you wish) and your users still only have to answer a few simple questions.
Like the previous system when they complete their order/booking it’ll automatically book the required facilities as well. The difference in the new system is that it’ll book the facilities in accordance to the choices they’ve made.
Getting everything setup is quick and easy. In this example we’re going to setup a service for a ‘Lesson with Junior Instructor’. The first step is to create a facility group that contains the facilities that could be used to teach the lesson in. You can find this option by going to Facility and click on the Show Dependency Groups button. This will show you all your existing groups and allow you to create a new one (shown below).
Within this form you can create a group and populate it with facilities. At this stage you also get to select the ‘group type’. At the time of writing there are two types; Choice and All. The type defines how the group is used when working out availability.
The next step is to add the new group as a dependency of the service. To do this go to Admin -> Service and edit (or create a new) service. Scrolling down you’ll find the Dependant Facility box.
Click on the plus to add the dependancy, then in the dropdown choose our newly created group (in this example Group: Schools). Then simply save the service.
You have now successfully setup the service and it’s dependencies and so it’s ready for your customers to use.
This new system offers complete flexibility in how you setup your yard and it’s dependencies, all whilst keeping things simple for your users. We’ve already had customers start using the new feature to great effect simplifying and optimising their day to day admin.
So if you’re using At The Yard and are not currently taking advantage of the new flexibility what are you waiting for! Alternatively if you’re not yet one of our customers and the idea of being able to have all the flexibility this offers whilst not creating any additional admin work please do get in touch today. We’d love to give you a demo and show you how you can save time and money.
Today we’re introducing a new feature to help you manage your yards - Rotas.
With Rota’s you can manage the day-to-day operation of your yard. Anything from who’s working on what day through to managing who’s responsible for poo picking which field throughout the week.
By managing your Rota in At The Yard you can ensure that your customers and staff always have the latest, up-to date Rota.
We’ve made it quick and easy to create a new rota, all you need to do is go to the management tab and click on Rotas.
From there you can click on Create New Rota. This will bring you to the Rota editing screen where you can choose the Rota Group name (e.g. Poo Picking). You can then give titles to the individual parts of the Rota (in this example the name of the paddocks) and select on which days who will be responsible for clearing them. When done, you click on ‘Create’ or ‘Update’ and your Rota will be ready to go.
Once you’ve setup your first Rota your customer will have a new Rota button on the menu. They can click this button and see all the Rotas at the yard - always kept up to date with the latest changes.
Finally when they click onto a rota group they’ll see the Rota and then - get on with the Poo Picking!
As with many of our new features, this came from a discussion with a new yard we were demoing the software to. So if you have any feedback of existing features or would like to suggest new ones we’re always happy to hear them! Drop us a message on the contact form on our home page!
It’s #FeatureFocusFriday again and this week we’re pleased to be launching another new feature for all our users.
We’re introducing Published Calendars. With published calendars you can choose a subset of your Facilities and Services to put on a calendar that can be embed’ed on your own website, available for everyone to see, no login required!
This feature goes even further than last weeks’ Yard Wide Display by letting prospective customers (not yet registered in the system) to see availability and also get a general idea of what’s going on at the yard.
It can also be used for large format displays in common areas, tack rooms etc. to keep everyone in the loop and aware of what’s going on at your yard/equestrian centre (please send us photos if you do this 😁).
To help get you up and running we’ve put together a screencast showing you how to configure a new published calendar. Then we show you how to embed it in Squarespace and Wordpress. You can of course use other platforms as well and if you need help please let us know.
Check it out below
As with many of our new features this comes from discussion with our customers. If you have any feedback of existing features or would like to suggest new ones we’re always happy to hear them! Drop us a message on the contact form on our home page!
Enjoy your weekend!
One of the most common interactions users make with At The Yard is ordering an ad-hoc service from their livery yard.
This is great for liveries. By making it quick and easy to order additional services they can make the order as they think of it. No more forgetting to write it a book when you get down the yard like the old days. It’s also great for the livery yard. The easier it is for their customers to order extra services, the more they’ll do so and so the more revenue the yard makes! We think this is a pretty great win win all round!
So! With this in mind we’ve been polishing and refining the ordering process to make it easier than ever. To do this we made 2 small changes to how the ordering process works:
With these changes (and a bunch of little others like improving the day selection checkboxes to make them easier to select) we’ve got the number of clicks for an average service order down from 9 to 5 (if our counting is right). This is not only quicker but it has simplified the whole process as well.
Sounds good, but seeing is believing! So take a look at old and new side by side and get a feel for how much quicker and easier it really is.
We hope you all agree that it’s a significant improvement.
This update is the latest in our ongoing series of refinement and polishing updates. These improve the day to day experience of using At The Yard. We’re having a great time making them and believe the cumulative results will lead to real benefits for our users over time.
So, if you have any suggestions for any little tweaks or improvements to a feature, please get in touch and let us know!
This week, rather than bring you one big update of an existing feature or something brand new, we’ve launched lots of little updates and tweaks to existing features in At The Yard.
We’ve always had the ability to filter charges by date and by a specific ID. We’ve updated this to remove the ID filtering (it was never used) and add the ability to filter by description. This means you can now filter charges by a particular service (e.g. a Lesson).
We’ve also added a total of the charges at the bottom. Meaning you can now choose a service and see the total income for a chosen time frame!
The user calendar is present on the front screen of every users page. We’ve updated this so that users can travel forward and backwards in time to see what’s going (or has been going) on. They’ll see their services, bookings as well as the public service and bookings of other users.
There’s also a small update on it’s design. We now only show a week (as you can navigate through) so it uses less space and it now automatically increases/decreases in size to show all the calendar items present without having to go to another page. Finally depending on the view it’ll automatically enlarge todays forecast.
When creating a user in At The Yard you had two methods:
These are still both present but we’ve added a third!
Create a Login User. This allows you to create a user who will instantly receive an email with instructions as to how to login whilst also allowing you to instantly start configuring their account.
As part of this addition we’ve made a new menu which explains the various options and allows you to easily select them.
This should reduce any confusion that previously existed and add extra options to yard owners!
The create all invoice button allows you to automatically create invoices for all customers who have an outstanding debt. Previously when you did this you had no choice but to send an email. Today we’ve added an additional option which allows you to create the invoices without sending emails.
There are a few extra little tweaks here and there (but they’re not too exciting so we’ll spare you the details). As always we’re working on new features and look forward to being back with more soon - in the meantime enjoy the little tweaks and small additions.