How Laura Sterling's yard runs on Horsepower

A busy livery and riding yard with around fifty riders, helpers and families, and a couple of dozen horses and ponies — all sharing one app instead of a whiteboard and a dozen group chats. Here's a day in the life.

One calendar the whole yard can see

On a normal day the yard has a dozen or more rides on the board — early lessons, hacks out to the common, schooling in the arena, and evening rides once school and work are done. Before Horsepower that lived in one person's head and a wipe-clean board by the tack room. Now every ride, lesson and holiday camp session sits on a shared calendar that every rider, parent and helper can open on their phone. The Saturday crew see what Friday's team wrote without anyone forwarding a message.

The girls who ride there run half of it themselves

A lot of the yard's riders are teenagers and pony-mad younger children, and they've taken to the app faster than anyone. They log their own rides, tick off the yard jobs they've done, add photos from a beach ride or a show, and check which pony they're on before they arrive. Giving them their own logins — with the right level of access — turned "who's mucked out?" and "has the pony been ridden today?" from a phone-round into a glance at the screen.

Nothing slips — camps, vets and everything in between

Through the school holidays the yard runs day camps from nine till three, all on the same calendar so parents can see exactly what their child is booked onto. When a horse picks up an injury — a tendon strain that means months off — the vet visits, the "off work" note and the follow-up checks all live on that horse's record, visible to whoever's on the yard that day. Vaccination and farrier due-dates nudge the team a week ahead, so a booster is never the thing everyone forgot.

Why it stuck

Plenty of yards try an app and drift back to the whiteboard because it's one more thing to keep updated. Laura Sterling's yard stuck with Horsepower because the riders themselves keep it current — it's their ride diary, their photo album and their yard rota in one place, not an admin chore imposed from the top. That's the difference between software a yard tolerates and software a yard actually lives in.

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Rider numbers are approximate and no individual riders are named.