How do you see what you’re proposing changing this:
Itemizing won’t change that. Itemizing will just create more work. People who bitch about the cost will continue to bitch about the cost. More visibility every month isn’t going to change that. But it may give them something additional to argue about.
Well, average board rates in our area for a facility like mine are around $675.
I did the math, itemized, and it actually costs $825/mo for an average horse to be kept IF you want to pay your labor or have anything to fix the facility with at the standards I wanted to keep horses at. Oh, and have your time paid for at all.
So - the question is - do boarders want the standards or do they want the cheap cost? It’s easy enough to SAY they want the standards, but what I’ve found is that they don’t really know what that takes. Every time a post goes around about the cost, people are shocked.
Why not expose it? Your vet, everyone else gives you an itemized bill. Why not boarding? You want 6 bags of shavings a week so Pookie is up to their hocks in really lovely shavings? Pay for it and see it on your bill.
And - if the tracking was easy - just - imagine for a second that it was, or if it was charged for - just like you pay for front office staff.
My guess is that would depend on the area. In my above mentioned quest to find a new boarding stable in my new area, I ended up choosing the most expensive, by quite a bit, of all the places I looked at. The place was full up, but they had a couple of stalls opening up at the time I needed to move.
In the area I’m moving from, there isn’t the income base to support more expensive options. People generally go for the cheapest option even if it’s substandard (my opinion).
As a boarder, I would not be enticed by this plan. The BOs problem seems to be the hassle and lack of profitability. The horse owner’s problems are often affording care for their horse. Not sure this plan addresses either.
I do appreciate the stables that have a boarding contract that itemizes what “full board” includes. Often other services are available for a fee. Everyone should understand the financial aspects. IME, smaller BOs can sometimes get sucked into providing more and more without additional fees. The few places that offered “partial board” or “rough board” often had to deal with a lot of issues of lack of care or supplies or disputes over whose hay or grain etc.
If I were a BO looking to reduce hassle and be compensated adequately, I would draw up a very specific boarding contract. It would reflect the practices I decided worked best. Then I would make sure that I only accepted boarders who fully understood that.
As a boarder, I would not be enticed by a menu of options for every practice. Of course I would simply try to do the math and see what my monthly would likely be. I prefer to know a monthly amount unless I added something you offered for a fee (clipping, etc)
Not a fan. A dry stall is a dry stall, perhaps with turnout/in and filling of water buckets provided. Perhaps.
Because that should all be built into your pricing so that you can offer a set price to your customers. Look at a year’s worth of expenses and average it out. It’s a giant PITA, but not that hard 
When I was on DIY (dry stall but with turnout and water bucket filling provided by the BO) I bought a year’s worth of hay at once. In the summer I’d use very little and in the winter I’d go through it at an almost alarming pace. It averaged out over a year to a reasonable amount per month. I would expect a barn owner to be able to do the same - make calculations for a year and average it out to a per-month cost. Same with bedding, hard feed, etc.
It would drive me absolutely bonkers to have my board bill fluctuating every month for ordinary things. About 30 years ago I was at a barn that surcharged for some pretty mundane ‘services’ and it drove me bonkers trying to figure out my board budget.
If you want to offer things that most boarders are not going to take advantage of (daily booting, more expensive feed, different type of hay, etc.) have separate monthly board rates or surcharges to your board rate that are consistent year round.
If boarders argue about monthly charges being the same year-round despite x,y, and z, you tell them the price is average over a year and takes into account fluctuating feed/hay intakes, indoor time due to weather, etc. and that you do this to make their monthly bill paying consistent year round.
Thank you - that’s really what I was looking for. It’s not a plan per se, just a question.
But…
The market will support it, or it won’t. You say you’re not sure if it will. Do you think itemizing changes the market?
You should charge what your services are worth. You shouldn’t be subsidizing horse ownership for others.
You asked if this is something people who board would find attractive. As someone who used to board, and kept horses at a variety of different types of barns: no, this is not something I would find attractive at all. I would far, far, far prefer that the barn set a base rate and a la carte the seasonal or one off things.
And if I were told that I would be paying additional for the privilege of itemization? That would be a HARD no. Why on earth would I want that? Why would you want to employ someone to do that? Why would you want to track that? Who is monitoring and auditing that? That’s not something I want to have to verify every month, but if you’re going to bill that way, I sure will go through it and confirm I’m being billed correctly. What an incredible hassle–not just for the barn, but for the boarder, too.
Well, yes - but that means the BO fronted it for a year.
So - for example, let’s say hay goes up from $6/bale to $8/bale as it did last year when the fertilizer “thing” happened, grain went up $5/bag, and shavings went up $2/bag.
Hard to “wait” to pass that on :eek:
And, remember, @Alterration you need to take YOUR time into account. We’re not necessarily saying if you hired outside help!
And that’s why I closed my barn. And 6 other barns in the market closed this year.
Seems like looking for alternative models might be an interesting thing to do and I hadn’t seen this one proposed.
As a boarder, I’d rather pay a flat fee and have it documented what that includes and pay for anything over and beyond what my contact covers.
I’d have decision fatigue as an owner picking and choosing.
I wasn’t clear about my idea - I think you’d talk about it up front and decide with the BO what your horse needed. That way it would be more or less stable, with small variations based on weather etc.
Then if it needed some adjustment based on your horse’s needs or your preferences changing, the options would be there.
Yup, it sure does, which is how many businesses run. Buy at the best time of year to get the best price (whether it’s widgets or hay) and warehouse it. In my area, this is the way it’s done. As much as possible, BOs buy their hay off the field (or short-term storage) for an entire year - exactly the way I bought mine for the past few years. Start contacting the grower a couple of months out to make sure you’re still on their list, ask this year’s price, and get set to receive when they say they’re headed your way with wagons/tractor trailer loads.
And the other thing to remember is that you are bound by nothing to hold your board rate for X amount of time. If six months in the cost of something (or everything 
) goes through the roof, the answer is to raise your board rates to absorb that extra expense. This happens all the time in the grocery store, in the shoe store, in various service industries. The extra costs are always passed on to the customer.
I see the merits of this idea but as a BO, it would still be hard if the boarder says “I only want to pay for X amount of hay” (the prescribed miniumum amount). And you know that is about half of what their hard keeper horse actually needs. So now you, the BO, have a horse dropping weight in front of you. In theory, this should prompt the boarder to adjust their feeding expectations but in actual practice…?
That is true - but that would be cause for ejection I would think according to the boarding contract.
Will there be credits issued for boarders who help out? Say an employee misses a day and I pitch in to bring in or turn out horses, or help feed, or muck a few stalls, any service that the horse owner is being billed for.
How does itemizing in this manner change what the market will bear.
Because the issue really is that keeping horses, especially in high cost of living areas, is becoming untenable except for the wealthy. Is this a way to cater to their specific needs and attract that particular clientele?
Itemizing doesn’t change that high property values, high cost of supplies, high fuel costs, have just driven the cost of keeping horses beyond what many can afford.
I don’t disagree at all that the landscape, especially in the high cost of living areas, is bleak. Horse ownership as we knew it in the past is very rapidly changing and disappearing. But I don’t see how more detail on the monthly bill will change that.
Oh I know all of this, I have an MBA. My boarding business was a side business.
It’s just not common for how it’s done at most boarding facilities, especially with grain & hay. I can’t buy hay for an entire year and store it - not enough storage for a full year. I was getting monthly deliveries to support the horses that I had.
A barn near me tried it. I didn’t board there, so I don’t know how it went; but they moved to a more standard pricing model pretty quickly.
As a boarder I want the rate sheet to be clear about what I owe without anyone having to do a math equation. So if you want to subdivide, have your base model- stall, bedding, cleaning, food, hay, water, turnout up to whatever hours per day- and then add on packages billed by the month. Turnout clothing is an extra package (includes blankets, boots, fly sheets and masks.) Grooming is extra. Training services are extra. Medicine administration is extra. Etc. That way I know I opted into base care and turnout clothing and I’m paying $X + $X and I don’t have to do algebra every time I receive my monthly invoice or keep records of how often I asked Bailey Barn Manager to change my horse’s rug because the temperature swung 30 degrees in 2 hours.
If you’d like to try again, do the math and figure out what it will cost each boarder to pay their way without you subsidizing. If you believe the number is to high for your area you can either try it and possibly get a pleasant surprise, or ditch the idea.
I see the issue as more of barn owners not having the guts to raise prices sufficiently, rather than a problem of being forced to subsidize boarders. YOU set your rates. If your rates are not high enough to cover what you need them to cover (all expenses to run your barn and pay for your horse/s, or whatever you decide you need them to cover) either raise your rates sufficiently or pack it in.
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