Stables Systems founder Jeremy Hipes was recently featured in The Plaid Horse Magazine. He wrote about the operational chaos most boarding and training barns still run on. It’s a dry-erase whiteboard that’s already out of date by 9 a.m. His piece makes the case for barn management software as the real fix.
In the piece, Hipes traces it back to growing up on a 40-acre Quarter Horse farm in Virginia, where the day’s schedule lived on that whiteboard, along with the frantic text messages that followed once it fell out of date. Most barn owners have simply normalized the hours lost to paper checks, scribbled schedules, and manual billing. They treat it as part of the job, not a problem worth solving.
As he puts it, the real issue is “working hard at horsemanship and working needlessly hard at administration.”
What Barn Management Software Fixes
For barns still running this way, the fix doesn’t have to be complicated. Barn management software like Stables Systems replaces the whiteboard, the sticky notes, and the group texts. It gives owners, trainers, and clients one shared system everyone can see. Scheduling updates in real time. Billing goes out automatically. Health records stay attached to the horse instead of a clipboard in the barn aisle.
That realization is what led him to build Stables Systems, barn management software designed around how a barn actually runs. It tracks farrier cycles, lesson packages, and board billing automatically instead of on paper. Read the full piece, “There Has to Be a Better Way to Run a Barn,” on The Plaid Horse Magazine.
If you’re comparing barn management software for your own barn, see how Stables Systems compares to Stables.co, EC Pro, Stable Secretary, and Equine Office. And if billing is part of the headache, here’s how switching to monthly tuition billing can stabilize a lesson barn’s cash flow.