You ABSOLUTELY get billed for every pill depending on the system. And that’s absoutely what your costs are based on.
However, it’s not what I was initially proposing. It was something I was thinking about as people started freaking out LOL Seems like there is a LOT of emotion about this.
What?? Who is even talking about medication?
That would be the equivalent of supplies, which is what you’d be scanning.
I’m not sure why this is such an emotional topic. Can you help explain that to me?
That you’re proposing modeling barn billing after medical billing, which is perhaps one of the most fucked up things in this country, is nothing short of wild.
People have zero appetite for that. That is definitely not a solution to anything.
I think it’s a really unbecoming pattern you have of trying to undermine any disagreeing opinion by calling someone emotional. It says more about you than them.
Ah, our understanding of agricultural businesses is different, very different. But perhaps that’s because I’ve been around more successful farmers who are very serious about running their businesses as businesses than ones who are less successful.
FWIW, dairy farmers can tell you to the cent what each cow has made in the past year and what she has cost. They track EVERYTHING, but they do not pass on all that information to their customers.
I don’t mind people disagreeing, I just seem to have triggered something. Maybe it’s my reading of it. shrug I’m a jocular, really happy person. So I feel like I touched a nerve.
No, no, there is not. There is a lot of head scratching and eye rolling, but really not much in the way of emotion … except from you who is apparently triggered just a bit by people sharing their opinions with you.
Absolutely - they track everything. That was why I was surprised at the complaints that tracking would be too hard. 
All good. I was around smaller family farms growing up that are mostly gone now. They were serious too - they just never really got to the true business side of it. It was really sad to see them go, mostly to development.
No, but I have priced out web apps and software development. And I’m not quite sure how you’ve built two of these systems yet couldn’t suss out the problem with the quotes.
There was a lot of capitalization, repeated italics and sarcasm. I read eye-rolling as emotional, maybe I should have read it as mean. Dang.
Anyway - it’s a diversion. I really was just musing trying to think of a different way of doing things as I watch the industry collapse on itself.
As a boarder I wouldn’t want an itemized/by service list because my secret fear is once BOs/BMs really know how much everything costs, they’ll charge me more. 
My horses are kept at home, I know what it costs to house a horse in this area. I am amazed more barns have not gone under, though we’ve lost many in the last decade.
I feel sorry for any BO/BM that has to justify costs to boarders. Send them packing, there are a dozen grateful boarders waiting to take their place.
I write them - RoR developer with 20 years of experience. I’ve written several small business ERP apps as a solo developer within 3 months of development that support thousands of small businesses on the daily - concept to launch. Much less than an arena to build, $99/mo per business to pay and maintain.
I don’t do large enterprise ERP apps. Those are much pricier.
And that tracking is a very costly pain in the hind end. And you need to understand that that tracking (specifically dairy) is not done in the way you are proposing. It’s all done on averages apart from the actual milk output which is officially measured per cow (by an outside milk tester) about once a month and tracked overall by bulk tank pick up amounts.
Eye rolling = emotional? No.
Capitalization = emotional? Not in these cases. No-one is yelling or pitching a fit. Attempting to be very clear to get points across? Yup.
Dairies, on the whole, actually have way more tech than horse barns. Actually pretty crazy!
I wasn’t really proposing that we track and measure things like that, I was just musing based on the complaints about tracking.
But - what I really was proposing, going back to the original idea, was that the barn owner & horse owner would create a more horse-specific plan. Not that it change on the daily. Doesn’t need to be itemized, but the HO would know that based on the horse specific plan that you put together.
Fair enough. It “read” to me as more desperation and annoyance. Mea culpa.
I wasn’t clear in my original post, and it seemed like it. provoked a bigger response than I was expecting. I did find that surprising!
Curious where you live, because I have never ever seen any other service providers have such a detailed itemization for services.
Itemizing occasional services, like bathing and grooming, make sense, because they’re occasional. Doing this for daily standard expectations to the degree suggested is absurd. Going down to hourly turnout rates, and then substituting a stall cleaning if they got less turnout that day? That sounds like an absolute nightmare. Since you only want opinions from boarders - how would I know that my paid-for-service was actually completed, or substituted appropriately? I’m sure there are people that would like to be this picky about how much they pay for board. I, personally, would not like to have a fluctuating board price every month, and be charged for services I don’t know for sure actually happened (which is, of course, a running issue with the way a lot of barns currently operate, so not an inherent risk of the proposed itemization). I think it would be a major headache and source of tension on both sides. And that’s coming from someone who does NOT think BOs charging for extras (to a reasonable degree) is “nickel and diming” as some people think.
We know like 80% of boarders (boarders wanting standard board, not those paying for training/full-service at AA show barns) are not willing to pay what it actually costs. That’s a well-known fact.
Sure, but not to the extent your first post did. A vet bill says “$150 corticosteroid injection,” not “$100 corticosteroid, $40 administration of injection, $5 syringe, $5 needle.” An itemized general contractor bill for a bathroom remodel says “$2450 shower replacement” not “$500 removal of previous shower, $200 removal of damaged cement board, $200 new cement board, $200 installation of cement board, $800 vinyl shower insert, $400 installation of shower insert, $150 installation of shower head/faucet.”
I think the comparative for boarding to other industries that provide itemized invoices would be at most stall rental, cost of hay, cost of grain, stall cleaning, and turnout/in with monthly rates for each, not daily or hourly. Which basically already exists, a lot of areas offer dry stall board with the option to pay for the other stuff.
100%, and boarders seem to just expect it of them. I had a person boarding a rehab horse with me once. I offered the choice of a flat rehab board rate, and then a “partial board” rate where she provided her own feed and the rehab services were a la carte. She chose the latter. Then proceeded to get a billion supplements, a ridiculously complicated feed mixture (beet pulp plus alfalfa pellets plus grain plus rice bran plus this and plus that and plus the other), then needed me to order hay and bill her for it, etc. etc. Then after a few months complained to me that she was paying the same as she would have been at a larger rehab facility. Well ma’am, you chose to make your horse’s diet absurdly complicated. And the “same price” you think you’re paying as the large rehab place included half the number of daily hand walks that I was giving the horse. But sure. My price was the problem.
For what it is worth, both my large animal and small animal vet practice itemize down to the literal syringe. My small animal vet moreso, probably because of how exorbitantly expensive small animal vet-med is.
I actually disputed a line item of 3 rolls of Vet Wrap at $15/each on discharge paperwork from the ER. Brought it all back for a refund since I can get them for $2.49 at TS. That’s how cheap farmers are.
Fair enough - I have gotten itemized bills like the latter, but I take your point - I also explained my thoughts poorly.
I do calculate things down to the lb because again, I had tiny horses in my barn who ate comparatively tiny amounts of grass hay per day and huge hard keepers who could eat more than a bale and a half a day. But I’m a data nerd. Spreadsheets and calculations are my life.
That’s in part why I was breaking it out. I did find that without the backing of “it will cost x” up front, my choices as barn owner were simply saying “No” (which sounds nice but does take a toll on you) or doing it because it was good for the horse but that leads to burnout. At least with a very detailed list of services there’s a “this is what this costs” thing to point to.
But again - it was more about designing the service up front than itemizing on the back end, with the exception of specialties.
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