Blog
Today we’re releasing a new feature - Service Assignments. This new feature allows you to assign the services that need fulfilling at your yard to the staff members responsible for their completion.
As always, we know that every yard is different. That’s why we’ve added a comprehensive set of assignment types to encapsulate the way you want your yard to work.
Assign Once allows you to assign a staff member to a single instance of a request for a service.
Assign For A Subscription allows you to assign the staff member to complete this task for every occurrence in a particular subscription. For example, if a subscription for a Turn Out every Monday, Wednesday and Friday this assignment type will have the staff member complete the task on those three days.
Assign For All A Horse's Services assigns the staff member to complete all the services requested for a horse. This is useful, for example, if you have a staff member dedicated to looking after a particular horse.
Assign For All Requests For A Service assigns a staff member to complete all the requests for a particular service. This is useful if you have specialist staff, such as a dentist or farrier who are the only ones qualified to complete a particular task.
Assign For All Services On A Day assigns a staff member to complete all the services requested on a particular day. This is useful if you're setting up the working rota and want to assign the member of staff who works on that day.
Both making of and viewing assignments is done through the service forecast view
From this view you click on any of the Assign buttons shown to you. Your choice of button will effect certain types of assignments.
For example, if you’re making a day assignment the day on which you press the button will set the day you’re making the assignment for.
Likewise, if you’re making a horse assignment the button you choose will select which horse you’re making it for.
Whatever button you click you’ll get the Assignments page (shown below). This page outlines the details of each assignment type so you can always be sure you’re making the correct choice.
From here you can choose the type of assignment you wish to make, for this example we’re going to make a horse type assignment by clicking the Assign For All This Horse’s Services button. You’ll be shown the Assignment screen (shown below). This screen will change slightly depending on the type of assignment your making but the principals remain the same.
The first thing you need to do is choose the user to whom you are assigning the task to. Then the date the assignment starts (and stops) and the days of the week the assignment applies (allowing you to have different weekday and weekend staff for example).
Once you’re ready click Submit and the assignment is complete. You can now return to any of the Forecast views and see the assignments. Each assignment is shown by the staff members personal icon (in the example below the ATY jumping horse).
As you can see everything requested for Ginger The Horse is now assigned to Yard Admin.
If you want to make a change to an existing assignment you have two choices.
The first is to simply repeat the process and make a new assignment. The most recent assignment will override older ones and so making a new one will be sufficient (except in certain cases which are explained in the choice screen).
The other is to go under the management tab and click on Assignments. This screen will show you all the existing assignments, allow you to edit them and also to remove them.
The assignments feature is one that’s been requested by lots of different yards so we’re excited to be releasing it.
We’ve got some more tweaks coming soon to allow you to filter the forecasts to the tasks assigned to a particular user along with a few other usability features so check back soon for the next update.
The assignment filtering has now been added to the staff calendar view. This will allow you, for example, to see what’s been assigned to a member of staff and more importantly what’s yet to been assigned to anyone.
The only thing in business more important than invoicing is making sure you get paid! That’s why we’ve been working hard on improving payment tracking in At The Yard.
Up to this point payments in At The Yard have been relatively simple. An invoice could be one of three things
This was fine but it didn't offer yard owners much flexibility or the ability to store a lot of information.
We wanted to improve this whilst still keeping it quick and easy to keep track of who's paid you and who hasn't.
With this aim, at the end of last month, we released an update to payments. This moved the system from only having invoices marked as paid/not paid, to keeping track of individual payments. We can then use this payment information to calculate the paid state of an invoice whilst providing us with the extra information to do more in the future.
Straight away it’s allowed us to add the following:
The update has also expanded where payment details are shown. Allowing you to have the information to hand instead of having to go find it.
Take a look below at a few screenshots showing the changes in this update:
This update also allows us to move forward with our upcoming accounting system integrations. We’re currently testing our Xero integration so if you’re a Xero user please get in touch via our contact page.
P.S. If you've stumbled across this page, have/manage your own livery yard and are not yet a customer we'd love to show you more of At The Yard. Please visit our contact page and get in touch.
Today we launched a small usability improvement on User & Staff Forecast Calendars. The calendar view offers a broad overview of everything going on at your yard. This is great for getting an overview of everything but sometimes you need to focus in on one area.
For example you might only want to see what services need to be fulfilled today, what bookings do you have in the arenas or perhaps you just want to see what events are coming up.
To make this easier we’ve introduced Calendar Forecast Filtering. You can now visit the key at the bottom of every calendar forecast view. From there you can check and uncheck any type of entry which will show and hide it accordingly.
Let's take a look at this in action:
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!
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!