Calculator
What one lesson slot really earns you
Put in the price, the group size, the instructor rate and the cost of the horses in that hour, and see what the slot leaves behind.
Free tools
Free calculators for riding schools and lesson barns
Two numbers decide whether a lesson program holds together: what an hour of teaching actually earns you, and how many hours your horses can honestly give.
Barn arithmetic is rarely written down. Most owners know the lesson price and the instructor rate, and then everything else lives in a feeling about whether the month was good. These two calculators pull the pieces out where you can see them: the cost of the horse in the hour he works, the arena and insurance sitting behind him, the riders who cancel late, and the total load the string is being asked to carry.
Both run in your browser and nothing is sent anywhere. Use realistic numbers rather than the ones you wish were true, especially for horse cost per working hour and for how many hours a week you are actually willing to ask of a horse in his teens. The results are more useful the more honest the inputs are.
Calculator
Can your school string carry this week
Compare the horse hours your schedule demands with the hours your sound horses can honestly give before anyone gets sour.
Working document
The school horse work card
One page per horse that tells any instructor in your barn what he does, who can ride him, how much he works and when to stop.
Open to any lesson barn, no sign up
Neither calculator asks for an email address. A riding school owner should not have to hand over her contact details to find out what a Thursday evening group lesson earns once the instructor, the arena and four school horses have been paid for. Both run in the browser on the page you are standing on, the figures stay on your screen, and you can close the tab with nothing left behind.
They are worth having even if you never look at the booking software. Right now this arithmetic gets done on the back of a feed store receipt or not at all: a year of hay, farrier and routine vet divided by the hours one horse actually works, then lesson hours multiplied by the horses pulled per taught hour, then that total set against what the sound half of the string can honestly give at the ceiling you would defend to a vet. Written down once, those two numbers tell you whether to raise the group price, add a horse, or turn down the camp week that wants all eighteen of them for five days.
When the arithmetic says the string is short
Headroom in the red and a break even rider count you do not like are both schedule problems, and schedules are where they get fixed. A demo shows the weekly hour ceiling being enforced at the moment a parent books, so the totals you just worked out still hold in the middle of June. Bring the numbers you got here and we will start from those.