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At The Yard has a wide range of ways for your customers to record their needs/requests. From Facility Bookings through to Service Orders the customer can choose what they need when they need it (inline with the rules and restrictions you put in place as the yard manager).
However, as much as structure is important, there is always somethings we can’t predict or don’t fit into a predefined box. You need to let your customers let you know what’s going on or allow them to give you and/or the entire yard a message.
To support this we have what we call Messages & Events. This allows you to simply write your message (as you might do on a whiteboard or notebook), choose the horse(s) (if any) the message applies to and finally choose to share it with everyone or just yourself and staff. It’s as easy & as quick as that.
Of course the benefit of putting it into At The Yard is that the customer can write the message from anywhere and that it can be read from anywhere (the office, the stable block etc).
Some examples of this might be:
We’ve recently released an update to the Messages & Events system to, by default, make it easier and quicker to create the message. The update removes the requirement to add a time to the event. This means you no longer have to choose a time for an event which applies all day (e.g. putting on a rug) whilst still retaining the ability to be more specific when necessary (e.g. when letting people know when the farrier is coming).
And like most things in At The Yard this is then shown both on a users personal calendar & the staff forecast view.
This update makes a small improvement to the usability of an existing feature. We’re working on some major new features so keep an eye on our blog & Facebook to keep up to date.
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.
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.
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.
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!