Could you be wasting too much time on invoice management for your horse stable or perhaps no time at all? There is an easier, more organised and time-saving way to do basic invoice management in your horse stable, keep on reading!
As basic as it sounds, invoice management in stables comes with several issues especially when we try to:
1. Manually match the horse expenses with the client(s).
2. No tracking between horse expenses and daily planning.
3. Put all our focus on the care and training of the horse but ignore administration activities.
Making reports in equicty is very helpful to explain and settle costs with horse owners because we have all their expenses and prize money easily accessible from the day the horse first entered the stable.
– Emilie Proot – equicty user
Online billing management systems are beneficial for companies as well as stables to improve their short or long-term business performance [1]. Equicty delivers digital stable management solutions to make equestrians lives easier by automating their key business activities to save time.
Zooming into their finance module, stable teams can easily capture billable expenses on-the-go allowing the system to automatically make the owner’s invoice. This article explains the pains of invoicing management that several stables experience day-in and day-out and how you can turn that around!
Splitting costs amongst multiple owners might sound a bit complex when you don’t have time to do calculations regularly. The truth is that stables without an invoicing management system struggle to track, split and send accurate invoices to appropriate owners. This is not just frustrating for the horse owner but it is frustration in terms of organisation for your stable.
Multiple owners involved in one horse is a common type of ownership in the equine industry. General invoicing systems lack the features that connect horse expenses to their owners.
Equicty allows stables to manage ownerships of horses in their stables by stating the exact percentage that each owner holds. At the end of the month, it’s so easy to invoice the owners of horses because each owner is assigned their % share in ownership making the splitting of general expenses and the gaining of prize money easy to automatically be split. This way the system will save you tremendous time and help you avoid mistakes.
Take a look in your feed room and tell me how many different feeding supplements and products you use for different horses for different purposes. Well, I have no doubt that you could tell me that without hesitation. The real question is, could you tell your invoicing system what you told me? More than likely, yes, but who does? This is the problem that equicty have tackled because the products and services offered are the foundation of the bill that you send to your clients at the end of the month. A typical invoice may include supplements, dewormers, equipment, shoes, medication and all the services such as training fees, boarding fee, travel and competition costs. They are all expenses that are often not logged.
More than likely, the bill lacks details, maybe expenses and receipts that weren’t logged. If your stable is struggling to identify and match expenses between horses and owners, you may be inaccurately billing clients. This is not the case when you let equicty help you automate that activity! Equicty helps stables like yours to add the products and services you offer to your system. These can then be easily assigned to horses which are later found on the invoices that can be easily sent out through the system.
Do you lose receipts or forget to record them sometimes? It happens everywhere and to anyone but it’s important to manage it. What about when you go to a competition for a week and you have unplanned expenses? A stable can improve its business performance with a basic invoice management system in place. Each horse expense can be categorized as a product and billed to owners on a configured date. Your stable is a business and surely doesn’t run on its own. Although passion may lie in the care and training that goes into the horses daily, invoice management is an important business activity that determines the cash flow of the stable.
Equicty has developed an online billing system allowing you to manage expenses on the go. For example, when a pallet of feed is delivered, the receipt can be logged, if you have a team away at a competition allow them access to log receipts from extra and unpredictable billable show items. If you are overwhelmed, equicty have designed this software to free you of all of your invoicing pains and worries. Digitizing your receipts saves a lot of time and hassle for your stable management operation especially when you have more important things to do.
Relationships with clients can be so close that bills are sometimes thrown behind closed doors until a time comes when it needs to be dealt with. In the meantime, the horse has grown older, improved its performance but yet the stable has no record of the total cost of the horse over the years.
Always know the current financial worth of your horse by recording the initial cost of the horse from birth up until the point of sale, adding every general expense such as veterinary and farrier bills, training and competition expenses and take into account its total prize money earned in competition throughout its career. Making the balance between costs and earnings will give you some clear insights into the financial health of the horse but it will also give transparency and a recorded history of the costs involved over a period of time.
It’s very easy to know the total cost of a horse for the previous day, the year before or at anytime basically.
– Emilie Proot – EQUICTY USER
Stables that have a system in place for invoice management allows them to focus on their more important duties without worrying about the money that comes in and out of the stable. In other words, it simplifies expense collection and the management of invoice records to eliminate accounting data errors due to human data entry and minimizing records keeping redundancy [2].
We have a perception that invoicing takes time to make and requires a lot of manual effort for a stable. This may be especially evident when the stable doesn’t have administrative staff hired. Setting invoices to recur can save time by setting up subscriptions for horse owners based on the bills they are required to pay on a daily, weekly, monthly or yearly basis. If you don’t have somebody to manage this area of your stable, equicty helps you automate invoices by setting them to recur based on the period you have set.
Pieter Devos and Niels Bruynseels, two international Belgian Showjumpers in fact share the same power woman Emilie Proot to manage the financial activities that happen in their stables such as logging veterinary information, expenses and outstanding bills. Emilie says ‘I put everything into equicty when the vets come, I also put in what they did’. Stables have a certain cost for operating depending on several factors and it is very much possible to manage expenses and log them on-the-go which makes Emilie’s double job possible. Sit back and relax and let the system invoice for you. Did you ever imagine that you could just set this up once and then automate the entire process? It’s a job that you just don’t need to waste time doing!
If you require a digital solution to help you improve your organisation and efficiency in your stable, try equicty. Save time, money and stress by finding the best way to manage your stable. Try equicty’s 21 day free trial today and receive expert support during set up.
1. K. Barata, P. Cain, and D. Routledge. International Records Management Trust Right and Records. London, United Kingdom: Institute London, 2001. Accessible online: www.irmt.org/documents/assessment%20tools/mfsr.pdf
2. McKinney, J. B. (2015). Effective financial management in public and nonprofit agencies. ABC-CLIO. Accessible online: books.google.pt/books?hl=en&lr=&id=77FoBgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=McKinney,+J.+B.+(2015).+Effective+financial+management+in+public+and+nonprofit+agencies.+ABC-CLIO.&ots=UbDgTqW-QP&sig=wpfbCHxBjR-MItwUKGvGUs2y4Ik&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
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