Scheduling, billing and receiving payment can be among the biggest headaches for farriers. Conrad Trow employs a strategy that makes his hoof-care business operate more smoothly for him.

The Goshen, Ky., farrier uses a whiteboard that details the next appointment for his sport horse clients. Trow updates the whiteboard during each visit with a new appointment that’s scheduled for 5 weeks later. He finds that it eliminates endless texting or calls when trying to get a client to comment, and the whiteboard serves as their reminder.

While Trow’s associate finishes the last horse and cleans up the work space, Trow enters the next date from the board into his iPad, along with a few notes. The notes are emailed to his accountant, who transfers them to Quickbooks for reference later.

“At the end of each day, I email the notes to my accountant,” he says. “My billings go out every day as soon as the work is done. If you wait until the end of the month to do billings, you are likely to miss detail. And if you wait a month, then some clients will wait the next month to pay you, and now you have gone 2 months without payment. With the tools available, why aren’t we doing our billing instantly?”

Trow has 75% of his clients on credit card to expedite payment and a handful pay him by check. The Thoroughbred race barns get billed once a month because of the impracticality to billing frequently with so many horses on their books.

For more business tips and hoof-care knowledge from Trow, read “Shoeing Performance Horses in Oldham County, Kentucky” in the May/June issue of American Farriers Journal.