Hi all,
In my copious amounts of spare time (read: while fighting insomnia last night), I came up with the idea of creating an online horse/barn management site/software. Given that I was not extremely coherent at the time, I figured I’d see if it seemed like a viable idea, so you guys are my sounding board.
Just as a general concept, this would allow you to:
It would be a great idea!
I have always wanted to pay my barn via credit card for board (for airline miles!), but none of them have taken it!
I’d also suggest adding the ability to scan in documents, such as pictures or health papers, etc. It would be AMAZING if you could access them via mobile. (I’ve definitely had an instance where the owner forgot the coggins on a horse, and the only way we could get the horse off the trailer was because she had scanned it and saved it to google docs! [courtesy of my iphone]). Clearly, we had to run to Kinko’s before she could register, but it saved us some craziness…
A dynamic calendar is always helpful; someone in the office gets a call to cancel a lesson, and you [the trainer] happens to be 1/2 across the grounds.
Alerts are really helpful; especially if the entire day comes to you at 6am when you’re feeding.
I know there is a “horse show management” software in the ether somewhere out there, but it would be awesome if you could include an add-on or something.
I have no idea what custom software runs these days; the only experience I’ve ever had with B2B has been non-profit databases (Raiser’s Edge & Advance), which are wildly priced for their industry. I think it would also depend on the size of the farm… Ie. 300 broodmares versus 12 boarders.
Yeah, I would probably have some sort of price tier.
Owner - Set price for 1-2 horses, 3-5 horses, 6-10 horses, 11+ horses
Boarder - Sst price for 1-10 boarders, 11-20 boarders, 21-50 boarders, etc.
I’ll probably just have one price for trainers, since their number of students would fluctuate so wildly.
Alternately, I could charge a one-time fee to “unlock” the extra options (more horse records, options for more boarders, whatever), and then have a fee per payment that gets processed. So the credit card company charges 3% (or whatever) to process your payment, and the online management site would charge 1% on top of that for the software to accept credit card payments. Then you only pay when you get money coming in.
There is an existing site that attempts to do this sort of thing, but it’s pretty infrequently updated (last 3 changes were 12/08, 11/08, and 1/08) and appears to be trying to be the equine MySpace as well. They are free, but they don’t offer online payments, which (to me) seems to be 90% of the point of all of this.
Hi,
Sounds like a great idea but I do believe that they already have versions of this out in the market place.
I ran across a few of these sites in my searching. A year or two ago.
I’m not so hot on the whole adding more money thing. I’m in college and already have to pay for my dog, most of horse board, etc.