The manager with a spreadsheet
A livery yard manager is not choosing a vet or a farrier the way a single owner does. They are putting a figure in front of a yard owner, or in front of fourteen liveries who each have to agree to it. They need numbers before they need charm, and they need them today.
Send that person to a website that says fees on request and you have asked them to make a phone call in order to fill in a cell in a spreadsheet. Most of them will make it to one practice, not three, and it will be the practice whose site already gave them most of the answer.
What blind budgeting costs you
You get rung instead of shortlisted. Every unpublished fee is a phone call, and the calls land during the working day, on the person least able to take them.
You lose the comparison you would have won. Practices avoid publishing fees out of a fear of looking expensive. In reality a stated fee with an honest explanation of what it covers usually reads better than silence, because silence reads as something to hide.
The yard budgets wrong and blames you. A manager who guessed at a callout charge and then received an out of hours invoice has an awkward conversation with a yard owner, and that conversation ends with someone suggesting they try a different practice.
You attract the wrong enquiries. Without figures, everyone rings, including people who were never going to proceed. With figures, the people who ring have already accepted the numbers.
What to publish
The visit fee. The base charge for coming out, and how it works when several horses are seen at one stop, because that is the number a yard cares about most.
Routine procedures. Vaccinations including the primary course and boosters, routine dental work, and for farriers a standard set of shoes, a trim, and common remedial work. These are the predictable, repeatable items a yard budgets annually.
How emergencies are charged. Not a fixed figure, because emergencies are not fixed. The basis: whether there is a callout charge, whether out of hours differs, and that treatment is charged on top. An owner who understands the structure at eleven in the morning is not surprised by it at three the next morning.
What varies and why. Two or three sentences of plain English. Distance beyond a stated radius, horses that need sedation, the difference between routine and remedial work, medication charged separately. Owners are not annoyed by honest variables. They are annoyed by learning about them on an invoice.
The yard account page
This is the page almost no equine site has and every yard manager wants. It covers shared visit fees when several horses on one yard are seen in one stop, account terms and payment arrangements, how invoicing works and who receives it, how horses are added to or removed from the yard's list, and a named contact who answers.
Write it to the manager, not to an owner. Different reader, different questions, and it is worth its own page rather than a paragraph on Contact. Managers are the highest value visitors your site gets, because winning one wins a standing entry in your round and access to every owner on the yard.
Keep the numbers editable and keep them true
Fees change, usually annually. A fee table typed into a page needs a developer, so it goes stale and the site quotes last year, which is worse than publishing nothing. Built as structured records with a field per item, you edit a value in April and the page re-renders, ten minutes, nobody to chase.
Make the site and the practice software agree. Set the pricing in whatever runs your invoicing, whether that is ServiceM8, Jobber, Provet Cloud or ezyVet, and write the site's table from that rather than the other way round. A yard that reads a figure on the site and receives the same figure on the invoice has had a good experience before you ever opened the van door.
The work you genuinely cannot price
Lameness investigation, complex remedial shoeing, anything requiring imaging or referral. Do not invent a number for these. Publish the visit fee, publish the routine items, then say plainly that investigative and remedial work is quoted after assessment and offer a route to book that assessment. That prices the ordinary majority of your work and gives the rest a booking path instead of a phone call.
A word on the rules
Publishing fees is normal and expected in most markets, but veterinary advertising and professional conduct rules differ by country, and there are also consumer pricing rules about how prices are displayed, including whether tax is included. If you are unsure how your fee page reads against either, check with your own regulator or professional body before publishing. This is orientation rather than legal advice.
Where this sits
A fee table held as editable records, plus the yard account page with shared visit fees and terms, is part of an equine vet and farrier website as we build it, and stated pricing runs through the rest of our pet business websites too. Our own packages are on pricing. Give the manager the number and you are on the shortlist before you have spoken to anyone.