Adi Devonish from LiveryLive explains how the world of add-on sevrices is slowly changing to help both yard owners and horse owners better manage these costs.
Our Livery world is an extraordinary industry; some practices are unique to us but make complete sense and one of these areas is billing. Standard stable rent is paid in advance with additional services paid in arrears, all on the same bill. We’re used to it and it works, mostly. A bill dated 1 January will have January’s stable rent (from 1st to 31st) along with December’s extras as agreed and completed – for example; two extra bales, a full livery weekend and holding for the Farrier.
What if all your extra services were paid at the time they were requested via an App? Let’s pause to let that idea settle . . . it’s revolutionary . . . but there are enormous advantages. It’s the equivalent of a good spring clean for your cash flow. You are no longer providing services for which you’ll wait up to four weeks, or maybe longer, to be paid. Extra bales for example – you’ve already paid your hay man so let’s get that settled sooner rather than later.
A less obvious advantage retold to us by many yards is cutting down the chance of error, misunderstanding or simple forgetfulness. No-one’s bill ever comes as a surprise because there are no extras on it to be queried. Paying at the time of booking focusses the booker’s mind on their personal budget in real time.
Pay as you go is not just for phones – the LIVERYLive management App is revolutionising our industry and, once a yard has the App set up for billing and service requests, we’re seeing a surprising take up in yards choosing to press a button in their settings so additional service requests are charged at the time of booking and are shown on the next bill for information.
At LIVERYLive we have introduced several new features along with smaller tweaks and improvements – many are a direct result of what our Yard Owners feed back to us. The Pay on Request feature is a useful function that can be turned on or off – it’s so simple to use and we’re very happy to hear how seamless the switch has been for yards who’ve decided they want to adjust their billing in this way.
Vive la Révolution!