My mother has run her riding school for over forty years. With a notebook, a landline and a memory that still impresses me. She knows which pony carries which child on Wednesday at 4 pm, who has paid for their card, and which horse has had its wormer. Almost.
Because memory, even hers, has holes. A licence nobody renews. An hour nobody takes off the card. Or, worse, one taken off twice. And that is no longer a lapse of memory, it is a tense conversation at the edge of the arena with a parent who has been counting. It worked because of her. That was both what held the yard together, and the problem.
I understood it for good one night. I was coming down the stairs at 2 am, and there she was, at the kitchen table, with her paperwork. Every evening, in fact; I had simply never seen her at that hour. I looked for whether something existed. Things existed. Too complicated, too expensive for a yard like hers. So I wrote a small application, for her. Equimondo came out of that.
This is the most counter-intuitive idea in this article, and the only one that really counts. When an owner tells me « I want to save time », I reply that first they will spend a little. Not much: with file import, whether from another system or from a handwritten sheet, riders and horses are in Equimondo in five minutes. But they will then have to get used to looking at a screen rather than a notebook.
What changes is not the speed at which the owner does things. It is that they no longer do them. Take a clinic booking. Without software: the parent rings, the owner picks up, writes in the notebook, asks the level, explains the price, reminds them about the licence, hangs up, forgets to note the phone number, rings back the next day. Ten minutes of the owner's life, in pieces, in the middle of something else.
With software: the parent opens their phone on a Sunday evening, sees the clinics, the level required, the price, signs up, pays. The owner sees one more line in the timetable on Monday morning. The work was not made faster. It was done by someone else, at a moment when that person had time to do it.
That is what riding school management software is: a transfer of load. From you to your riders, for what concerns them. From you to the machine, for what repeats. What is left is what nobody will ever do in your place: teaching, caring, deciding.
My mother has never counted the time she spends on the phone. One evening, I counted it for her. Between 6 pm and 9 pm: parents moving a lesson, an owner asking whether his horse had its rug on, two people wanting a price, one asking whether the yard was open during the holidays. Nothing unusual. Nothing serious. Three hours.
That cost appears on no statement. It is a cost in evenings, in concentration, in patience. And it is also time not spent with your family. It is precisely because it appears nowhere that it is allowed to grow for forty years.
And it has changed shape. Today, many owners no longer pick up. They watch missed calls pile up between two lessons, and they do not ring back. But think of the person on the other end: she found your yard online, she rings, nobody answers. If your website lets her book in three taps, she books. That is one more rider. If your website offers nothing, she rings the next yard on the map.
Riding school management software does not make those costs disappear. It makes them visible. And what is visible becomes manageable.
I watched my mother's instructors constantly interrupted by parents, at the edge of the arena, mid-lesson. « How many hours are left on my card? » « I am not coming next week. » The instructor said yes, of course, and then forgot. Inevitably: he had five riders in the school and a pony refusing the pole. The following Wednesday, the place had been held for a child who was away, and another family had been told it was full.
Now put yourself in the place of a mother of two riding children. She manages her medical appointments on one app, her shopping on another, her train on a third. And for riding, she has to catch the instructor between two lessons, or ring between 6 pm and 7 pm, precisely when the owner is teaching. She does not hold it against you. But she compares, without saying so.
What the rider expects is not a gadget. It is to see, from their phone, the available slots, what is left on their card, the invoices, their child's progress, and to be able to book without disturbing anyone. When a yard offers that, they do not see it as technology. They see it as respect. And a rider who feels respected comes back in September.
« Management software » can mean anything, so let me be precise. What it must do without you:
And what it must leave you:
This is the objection I hear most, and I am going to surprise you: the second half is perfectly reasonable. I call them the die-hards, affectionately, and my mother has been one for forty years. Those owners who want to stay on paper. And you know what? They are right. If it suits them, that is what matters, because running a business is first of all a pleasure, and you do not put a thorn in the hoof of a horse that is going straight.
Time, however, is no longer an objection. Five minutes to import your riders and horses from a file or from your handwritten sheets, and the rest builds up through use. The owners I work with never switch « in the quiet month », because the quiet month does not exist. They switch the day they have had enough. One owner switched after taking the same card twice from a family who kept their accounts better than she did.
The question I get asked is « how much does it cost ». I always answer with another: « how much does it bring in ».
It brings in the calls you never answered and that book anyway. It brings in the two places in Tuesday's lesson that the waiting list fills by itself. It brings in the livery nobody forgets to invoice, the card nobody takes twice, and therefore the client nobody loses over ten pounds. It brings back your evenings.
At Equimondo, everything to do with running your yard and your horses is free, forever. So you can do the sums without risk: open online booking, and simply count, after a month, the riders you would not have had.
There are 900 yards working with Equimondo today, and 120,000 riders logging in every month. My mother is not one of them. She has her notebook, and she is entitled to it. But if one day you come down the stairs at 2 am and see yourself at the kitchen table, you will know something else exists.
Further reading
Equimondo is free for life for everything to do with your horses.
That is where it changes the most. In a small yard, the owner does everything, and it is the owner the software relieves first. A yard of 40 riders gains proportionally more than a yard of 400.
Five minutes to import riders and horses from another system's file or from your handwritten sheets. Riders get into the habit of booking online within two weeks.
They are waiting for it. The question they ask is rather: why was this not already possible?
Then stay. An owner who feels comfortable with their notebook manages better than an owner forced onto software. The day the notebook weighs on you, five minutes will be enough.