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Running a yard requires a team of people to make it a success. This means you'll likely be hiring regular staff, bringing in helpers or using freelancers to help with the day to day running of the yard.
To help make life easier we’ve introduced tools into At The Yard to help you and your staff keep track of the hours they work. This makes it quicker and easier to pay them (which is great for both you and them) whilst ensuring the amounts are accurate and fair.
In the rest of this article we’re going to take a look at how to use this new feature.
Contents
You can access the staff work recording area by clicking on the Staff Menu and clicking on Record Work. You’ll be greeted with the page shown below. You can enter your worked hours and review your previous hours.
The left hand side of the screen is dedicated to entering your hours. Staff can do this at the end of the day and can enter multiple times at once by clicking the green + button (this is great if they take a break for lunch etc). When they’ve entered all their work hours for the day all they need to do is click Record and the hours will be saved.
Once you’ve entered your worked hours you’ll see them on the right hand side of the screen. There is also a label to let you know if it’s been approved by your yard manager or not. When they approve the hours this will be updated.
In the menu click on Admin and Edit Staff Rates. This will bring you to the Staff Pay Rates section where you can review your current staff pay rates and create new ones. The rate set at the time a staff member records their hours will be used to automatically calculate the total pay owed to them. Because of this it’s important to set up your staff with the correct pay rate before they record any hours.
To create a new Staff Pay Rate click on New Staff Pay Rate and it’ll open a new dialog. In the dialog you can choose the staff member and set their rate. When you’re ready click Submit and it’ll be ready to go.
Click on Admin and Review Staff Hours. This will bring you to the staff hours review page. Here you can record additional hours on behalf of staff members (useful if they’ve forgotten to enter any). You can also see all the records staff have recorded and approve them. Finally you can create time sheets (which can be printed). The timesheet will show all the hours worked and the total pay owed to the staff member.
This is the same process as listed above for a staff member. The only difference is that you need to select the member of staff it’s for. If you need to make multiple records just enter one, click Record and repeat.
On the right hand side of the screen you can see all the recorded hours for the month (you can swap months by choosing a different month from the drop down box and clicking go).
To approve a record click Approve. It’ll swap to ‘Approve by Your Name’. Once approved the record will be eligible to be added to a time sheet.
To begin the process of making a time sheet for a user select the users name and click on New Time Sheet.
You’ll see all the staff work records that have been approved and are not yet linked to a time sheet. If you want to exclude a record from this time sheet you can untick the box under Include?. Once you’ve finished selecting the staff work records you wish to use click on Create.
This will create the time sheet and take you back to the review page. You’ll see a new time sheet has been added. For each time sheet you can see the total time worked and the pay owed to the staff member.
If you click on Show it’ll bring up the time sheet and show you all the details. Please Note: This is only a timesheet and does not act as a Pay Slip. If you need to issue a Pay Slip you’ll need to use appropriate tools for that.
This new addition will give you the tools you and your staff need to easily and quickly keep track of the hours worked. It makes it easy to calculate the pay owed and reduces errors for both parties.
P.S. If you've stumbled across this page and have your own livery yard we'd love to show you more. This was one of our #FeatureFocusFriday posts where we highlight a feature in At The Yard but there’s much more to see. Please visit our contact page and get in touch to find out more.
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.
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.
Today we’re excited to announce our latest new feature called The Activity Log. The Activity Log will help owners keep up to date with completed services, updates and any changes about their horse all in one place and at a moments notice.
In our last blog post we introduced Rich Text & Images into the horse database. The activity log makes full use of this allowing you to publish updates with images to your customers so they can easily keep track of the latest information about their horse.
The screenshot below gives you an overview of what your customers can come to expect when viewing the Activity Log for their horses.
To make life simple the log supports filtering to allow you to focus on either Services or Updates and you can quickly and easily jump through dates to review past log entries.
As we go forward we’ll be adding additional log entry types as we introduce new features. This will ensure it will remain the place to go for the latest about your (or your customer’s) horses.
Today we’ve released an update to the Horse Database.
This update allows you to store Rich Text and images in the horse database (much like you’ll be used to in any word processor etc).
To explain how it works and what you can do with it we’ve made a quick video:
We think this new feature will let you better update your customers and keep more comprehensive records. For example you can:
We’re sure you’ll find lots of other uses we could never think of. We can’t wait to see what you do with it. As always if you have any questions or suggestions please get in touch!