The whiteboard wiped before anyone copied it
It is the last day of the month and you are sitting at the kitchen table with the invoices. The base livery for each horse is easy, because it is the same every month. The extras are the problem. Somebody brought in Bramble three evenings when her owner was stuck at work. Somebody changed rugs on the grey twice during that cold snap. There was a lunchtime feed for the old cob, and a hold for the farrier on Tuesday.
Some of that is on the whiteboard in the tack room, some of it was written in the yard diary, and some of it only exists in a WhatsApp message a livery sent at 7am. Half the whiteboard got wiped on Thursday when someone needed room for the turnout list. You bill what you can find and let the rest go, because chasing a livery for a rug change from three weeks ago feels petty.
Then a livery who pays for everything properly notices that someone else seems to get extras for free, and the conversation becomes awkward for everyone.
Why extras slip through on a working yard
The root cause is not carelessness. It is that the job and the record happen in different places, at different times, by different people. The groom who brings the horse in is holding a lead rope and a headcollar, not a pen. The person invoicing may not have been on the yard that day at all.
- Requests arrive by text, WhatsApp, a note on the stable door or a word in passing.
- Staff do the job first and mean to write it down later, when their hands are free.
- The whiteboard is shared for other things, so it gets wiped or overwritten.
- Prices for extras live in someone's head or on an old price sheet, so nobody is sure what to charge.
- Month end is the first time anyone tries to add it all up.
Any system that relies on remembering at the end of the month will lose some extras, and it will lose them unevenly, which is worse than losing them evenly.
Small charges, real money and a fairness problem
Individually these are small amounts. Across a yard with many horses and a busy winter, they add up to a meaningful part of what the yard should earn for work that was genuinely done. Staff time is spent either way. When it is not billed, the yard is subsidising some liveries at the expense of its own margin.
There is also the time cost of month end itself. Reconstructing a month from a whiteboard photo, a diary and a phone full of messages takes an evening or two that a yard owner rarely has spare. And inconsistency causes more friction than the money: liveries talk to each other, and uneven billing feels unfair even when it is accidental.
A tap-to-log extras record that feeds the invoice
We build a simple extras log designed for the yard, not the office.
- Each horse on the yard is listed with its owner and livery package, taken from your existing records.
- Your extras price list is set up once: bring in, turn out, rug change, extra feed, hold for farrier or vet, lunge, exercise, and anything else you charge for.
- Staff log an extra from a phone or a tablet mounted in the tack room, in two or three taps: horse, extra, done. It records who did it and when.
- Liveries can request an extra from their own phone, which puts it on the staff list for that day and logs it when ticked off.
- At month end, each livery's extras are gathered, priced and added to their invoice alongside the base livery, then sent to Xero, QuickBooks or Sage through their APIs, or exported if you invoice another way.
- Before anything is sent, you see a review screen of each invoice, so you can waive a charge for a good reason and make that decision deliberately.
| Moment | How it works now | With an extras log |
|---|---|---|
| Request made | WhatsApp, text or word in passing | Request sits on the day's list for staff |
| Job done | Written later, if remembered | Logged on the spot in a few taps |
| Price applied | Recalled at month end | Taken from your price list |
| Invoice built | Pieced together from notes | Gathered automatically per livery |
| Query from a livery | Your memory against theirs | Date, time and who did it |
The price list and any decision to waive a charge stay with you. The system only makes sure nothing is forgotten before you decide.
A normal day once it is running
A livery texts at 6.30 asking for her horse to be brought in early because the vet is coming. Instead of a text that someone has to remember, she taps the request in, and it appears on the morning list. The groom brings the horse in, taps done, and moves on. At month end the charge is already on her invoice, with the date beside it.
When a livery queries an invoice, you can show exactly which days the extras happened and who did them. Most queries end there. The ones that do not are at least about facts rather than memory.
Month end becomes a review rather than a reconstruction, and the whiteboard can go back to being used for turnout groups.
Does this sound like your yard?
- You rebuild extras from the whiteboard, the diary and your phone each month.
- You are fairly sure some extras are never billed, but not which ones.
- Staff are unsure what to charge for certain jobs.
- Liveries have questioned why others seem to pay less for the same help.
- Invoicing takes you one or more evenings every month.