Setting up the app for the first time

If this is your first time on Best Farrier, you have a little housekeeping to do before you can get the ball rolling. But once we have that out of the way, you will find that the app requires very little time or effort to use in your day-to-day routine.

Here’s a quick list of the steps you should take to set up all the information you need. Basically, you should configure your settings, create or import some contacts, and create their horses. After that you’re ready to start using the app.

Configure your settings

To get to the Settings page, tap on the “More” button on the bottom bar, then on “Settings”.

You will see a list of options that you can use to configure the app, or perform some special tasks. You can get to all of the pages mentioned below in this section by tapping on the appropriate option on the Settings page.

Set up the app settings

The App Settings page holds a number of settings and options used throughout the app, like date format, or if the calendar week starts on Sunday. It also holds your business information.

The first thing you should probably do is to enter your business info (name, e-mail address, etc.) so Best Farrier can use it when creating invoices or reports, and also use it on e-mails. Fill out the Business Info section with your own information — we put some placeholder content there, just delete it and replace it with yours. Note that the Business info field is multi-line, so you are not limited to just 3 lines.

While you are there, take a few moments to look at the rest of the settings and make sure they match your preferences. Pay special attention to the Invoice and Payment Preferences section, since those settings affect how your invoices are issued and taxes are calculated.

When you’re done, just tap “Save” on the upper right corner to save your changes.

Set up the types of appointments you schedule

These are used in the schedule screen, so you can tell different types of appointments are a glance by their colors. We provided a few for you as examples, but feel free to change them to what suits you. The one marked with a star is the default appointment type, and it gets selected automatically when you start entering a new appointment.

Tap on “Appointment Types” on the Settings page to start.

Set up the services and products you provide

Services and products are used when you create your invoices. You know what they are: shoeing a horse all around, trimming, putting a pair of pads on, etc. Use the Services page to create and maintain a list of the services and products you offer. We also provided a few predefined services for you to serve as a reference, but you can change or delete them as you like.

To get there, tap on “Services” on the Settings page.

Set up sales taxes or VAT

If you live or work in an area where you have to pay sales tax or VAT, you should set them up here. Any taxes marked with a star are default taxes and are picked automatically when you start a new invoice. You can have multiple default taxes, like your State Tax and County Tax, for example, or Standard VAT and Reduced VAT, or you can have no defaults at all — in which case you’ll need to select them manually for each invoice if you need to.

You can read about how the app handles Sales Tax and VAT in this blog post.

Get to the sales taxes/VAT page by tapping “Sales Taxes and VAT” on the Settings page.

Import Contacts

If you didn’t import the contacts from your phone to the app when you first started, you can do it here. Just check the boxes in front of the ones you want and click on “Import”.

Enter or edit your contacts

If you imported your phone contacts when you started the app the first time, you should have at least some of your contacts’ information already in. You can either enter the rest now, or do it as needed, for example entering all the contacts that have appointments next week so you can add them to the schedule.

Tap on the Contacts icon on the bottom bar to get to the Contacts page.

Enter the contacts’ horses

After you have some contacts, you can start entering their horses’ information on the app. You can either enter all of them (which could take some time), or do it as needed, for example entering all the horses that have appointments next week so you can add them to the schedule.

Tap on the Horses icon on the bottom bar to get to the Horses page. You can also add horses directly from the contact detail page by tapping on “Horses owned”.

Congratulations! You are done with set up. Now you can start using the app by adding appointments, writing invoices and receiving payments.