Barn management for horse boarding stables

The idea

A boarding barn charging 400 to 1,200 USD per horse per month runs its operations on a whiteboard feed chart and a spiral notebook. The recurring leak is add-ons: blanketing on cold nights, extra grain, holding a horse for the farrier, all billable, all logged nowhere, all forgotten by invoice day. A 20-stall barn plausibly writes off several hundred dollars a month of work it actually performed, in a business with famously thin margins.

BarnManager and its peers chase elite show barns with per-horse pricing and features for competition logistics. The wedge is the ordinary boarding operation: a feed chart staff actually read on their phones in the aisle, two-tap add-on logging at the moment the work happens, and a billing run that turns those logs into itemised Stripe invoices. Capture-to-invoice is the whole product.

Who pays

The barn owner pays 69 USD/month flat, no per-horse maths. Recovering even 100 USD of previously unbilled add-ons pays for it, and the itemised invoices reduce the awkward boarder disputes (“I never asked for extra grain”) that owners hate more than the lost money. Distribution: regional horse Facebook groups and boarding-barn owner communities, plus farriers and vets who visit dozens of barns and notice which ones are organised.

MVP scope

• Horse profiles with stall assignments, board plans, and feed/med charts
• Mobile-first staff feed chart and turnout board
• Two-tap add-on logging against a barn-defined catalogue
• Monthly draft invoices combining board and itemised add-ons, sent via Stripe with overdue reminders
• Vet/farrier visit calendar with boarder notifications
• Boarder portal showing their horse’s care and invoices
• Skip for v1: lesson scheduling, show/competition management, payroll, health-record deep tracking, native apps

Build StallBook, a web app for horse boarding barns of roughly 10 to 40 stalls. Stack: Next.js (App Router), Supabase (Postgres, Auth, RLS), Stripe for invoicing and subscriptions. Roles: owner, barn staff, boarder (read-mostly). Magic-link auth.

Data model: Horses (owner contact, stall/paddock assignment, board plan and monthly rate), FeedPlans (per horse: AM/PM/night feeds with product and scoop amounts, supplements, medications), TurnoutGroups, AddOnCatalog (blanketing 5 USD, extra grain 3 USD, hold for farrier 15 USD, etc.), AddOnLogs, Visits (vet/farrier/dentist), Invoices.

Staff view, the daily driver: a mobile-first feed chart grouped by barn aisle showing every horse's current feeds and meds, plus a turnout board. Staff log an add-on in two taps from the horse's row (pick from catalogue, done); each log stores who, when, and what.

Billing, the money feature: on the 1st, generate a draft Stripe invoice per boarder: board rate plus all add-on logs from the month, itemised with dates. Owner reviews drafts, clicks send-all, Stripe emails invoices with card/ACH payment. Dashboard tracks paid/overdue with automatic reminders.

Visit calendar: schedule the farrier for six horses on Thursday; affected horses get a hold-for-farrier add-on pre-staged, and boarders get a notification email.

Pages: barn dashboard, feed chart, horse profiles, add-on catalogue, visit calendar, invoicing, boarder portal (their horse, their invoices), settings.

Pricing: 69 USD/month flat per barn. 30-day trial.