Overview
Instructors are the people who teach your lessons. In Horsify each instructor has a profile (name, contact details, bio, photo, qualifications), a set of lesson rates, and — most importantly — an availability schedule that decides when clients can book them.
Instructor management is part of the riding-school toolset, so it is available on the Riding School plan, the Club Site Premium plan, and (for a single instructor) the Instructor plan. The $10 Club Site plan does not include it. See Instructor Tier - Solo Instructor Guide if you are a solo coach.
The one thing to remember: an instructor with no availability cannot be booked — not online, and not by you from the Bookings page. Horsify offers lesson times only inside the windows you set on the instructor's availability calendar. Your organisation's Booking Hours do not fill the gap for instructor-led lessons.
Who Uses This
Riding school administrators
- Add and edit instructor profiles, qualifications and photos
- Set each instructor's weekly availability and block out leave
- Set lesson rates and deposit rules per instructor
- Choose which instructors can be booked online, and in what order they appear
- Give instructors their own Horsify login so they can see their bookings
Instructors
- Use My day to run their teaching day from a phone (check riders in, put them on a horse, complete a lesson and write a note), see their lessons on a calendar, manage their own availability, and subscribe to a personal calendar feed
Clients
- Browse your public Our Instructors page and book a lesson with a specific instructor
Where to Find It
Organiser → Riding School → Instructors (/riding-school/instructors).
The Instructors page lists your instructors one row each: name and email, phone, employment type (with commission, if set), and status badges such as No availability, Not online, Qual expiring and No account, with View Details and Edit buttons. Tick Show inactive to include instructors you have made inactive.
On the Instructor plan the same page is called Your Profile and holds your single instructor record.
If you belong to more than one organisation, a Select Organisation dropdown appears at the top of the page — pick the riding school you want to manage.
Adding an Instructor
- Go to Organiser → Riding School → Instructors and click Add Instructor.
- Fill in the Basic Information:
- First Name and Last Name (required)
- Email (required) — also used to link or invite their Horsify login (see below)
- Phone
- Biography — shown on their public profile
- Profile Photo — JPG, PNG or WEBP (up to 25 MB; large images are resized automatically). The photo uploads once the profile is saved.
- Choose whether to Send Horsify sign-up invite (ticked by default — see Giving an instructor a login).
- Choose whether to Use the club's booking hours as their availability (see Availability below).
- Fill in the Employment Details:
- Employment Type (required): Full Time, Part Time, Casual or Contractor. Defaults to Part Time.
- Commission (%) — for your own records; Horsify does not calculate payouts from it.
- Check the Settings:
- Active — the instructor is currently on your team (on by default)
- Bookable Online — clients can pick this instructor when booking online (on by default)
- Display Order — lower numbers appear first on the public instructor list and in booking dropdowns
- Calendar Colour — the colour used for this instructor's lessons on your booking calendar. Leave it on Automatic to have Horsify assign one.
- Click Add Instructor.
Qualifications and lesson rates are added after the profile is saved — open the instructor again in edit mode.
Giving an instructor a login
An instructor does not need a Horsify account to be listed, booked or scheduled — you can run everything on their behalf. A login is only needed if they want to use My day themselves.
- If the email you enter already belongs to a Horsify account, the instructor is linked to it automatically and added to your organisation as a member with the Instructor role.
- Otherwise, leaving Send Horsify sign-up invite ticked emails them a sign-up link. When they accept it (or later sign in with that email), their login is linked to the profile.
- If you untick the invite, you can send one later from your organisation's Members page.
Once linked, the instructor sees a My day entry in their profile menu (the avatar at the top right). If they work for more than one organisation, My day has a picker for each one.
Availability
Availability lives on the instructor's detail page: from the Instructors list click View Details (/riding-school/instructors/{id}). The Availability Calendar panel has two tabs.
Starting point: copy your booking hours
When you add an instructor, Horsify offers to use the club's booking hours as their availability if you have booking hours set up (see Setting Your Riding School Booking Hours). This copies each booking-hour window into the instructor's weekly schedule as a one-off starting point — later changes to your booking hours do not flow through, and you can fine-tune the copy afterwards. If you have no booking hours yet, the form warns you that no availability will be set and the instructor cannot be booked until you add their hours.
After saving, a message confirms whether availability was seeded or still needs to be set.
Calendar View
A week-by-week calendar (Day, Week, Work Week and timeline views are available) showing:
- Available for Booking — green blocks
- Blocked / Unavailable — red blocks
- One-Off Session — dashed outline (a slot for a single date rather than every week)
To add a slot, click an empty time on the calendar (it pre-fills a 45-minute slot from that time) or click Quick Add (pre-fills 8 am–1 pm on the next weekday). In the Add Availability Slot dialog:
- Date — for a one-off slot, the specific date; for a repeating slot, the date sets which weekday it repeats on
- Venue and Facility — optional. Leave blank to make the instructor available at all venues/facilities. If you set them, that slot only applies when a lesson is booked at that venue or arena. Where several slots overlap, a facility-specific slot wins over a venue-wide slot, which wins over a general one.
- Start Time and End Time
- Availability Type — Available for Booking or Blocked / Unavailable. Blocked slots take a Reason for Unavailability (e.g. Annual Leave, Training).
- Repeat Weekly — tick this to make the slot recur every week on that weekday at the same time. Leave it unticked for a one-off slot on that date only.
Click Save Availability. Click any existing block to edit or Delete it. Blocks can't be dragged or stretched on the calendar: click one to change its times, or a one-off block's date.
Block Dates (the red button) blocks out a whole run of days in one go — ideal for holidays, leave or events. Choose the From and To dates (from today onwards, up to a year), optionally narrow the Time Window (it defaults to all day), add a Reason, and save. Horsify creates one blocked entry per day and skips any day that already has an identical block. Each day can later be deleted individually from the calendar.
List View
The Weekly Availability Schedule shows the instructor's repeating weekly slots grouped by day, Monday to Sunday. Click Add Time Slot to add a weekly slot by choosing the Day of Week, Start Time, End Time, optional Venue/Facility, and whether the instructor is Available for bookings during this time (untick it, and add a reason, to create a weekly blocked window). Slots can be deleted here; to change one, delete it and add it again, or edit it from the Calendar View. One-off slots and blocked dates only appear on the Calendar View.
How availability drives bookings
- Online booking offers clients only the times that fall inside an instructor's available windows for the day, minus any blocked windows and existing bookings.
- The same rule applies when you create a booking yourself on the Bookings page — Horsify will refuse a time the instructor has not been made available for.
- Blocked entries override available ones for the same time.
- Instructors with their own login can manage their own availability from the Availability view of My day.
Example week: five repeating slots (Mon–Fri, 9 am–5 pm), a repeating Tuesday 6–9 pm slot scoped to your indoor arena, plus a Block Dates entry for the two weeks the instructor is on leave.
Availability by text message
An instructor can text their hours from the mobile on their instructor profile. They text your organisation's own SMS number if you have one (set under Communication Settings), or otherwise the Horsify number. The instructor's page (Availability texts) and the coach's My day both show which number, and tapping it on a phone opens a text with HELP ready to send.
| They text | What happens |
|---|---|
AVAIL Sun 8am-3pm |
Available that day, 8am–3pm. This replaces anything else set for that day, including the usual weekly hours outside 8–3. |
AVAIL Sun all day |
Available all that day. |
OFF tomorrow · OFF 12-16 Oct · OFF next week
|
Off for the whole day or days. |
OFF Mon 2-5pm |
Takes 2–5pm out of Monday and leaves the rest of the day as it was. |
REPEAT AVAIL Mon-Fri 9am-3pm |
Their usual week: available every Monday to Friday, 9am–3pm. This replaces their previous usual hours on those days. |
REPEAT OFF Wed |
Off every Wednesday. |
CANCEL Sun |
Clears what was set for that day, so their usual hours apply again. CANCEL REPEAT Wed clears their usual Wednesday. |
UNDO |
Reverses their last text exactly, including anything it replaced. |
HELP |
Replies with the list above. |
Instructors don't have to use the exact wording. "Paris available 8am to 3pm Sunday the 4th October", "can't do tues arvo", "off 12th-16th" and "available every Monday 9 till 3" are all understood. Times with no am or pm are read as a riding-school day, so 8-3 means 8am–3pm and 2-5 means 2pm–5pm. Every reply states exactly what was set, so a misread can be undone straight away. A text the rules can't read goes to the AI, which rewrites it as one of the commands above. The command is then checked like any typed text, and the reply still says what was set.
What a text never touches: hours that come from the staff roster, and hours entered for a different venue or facility from the one the instructor's other hours use.
Instructors who also use the horse care assistant. On the Horsify number, a text that is plainly about their hours (it starts with a command or says "available") is treated as availability. Anything else goes to the care assistant, so "Bella off her feed" still logs a horse care note.
An instructor at more than one school who texts the Horsify number is asked which school. They include the school's name in the text, for example Riverview OFF Sat.
Every text, and what it did, is listed under Availability texts on the instructor's page.
Qualifications
Open the instructor in edit mode (Edit on the list or detail page) and scroll to Qualifications → Add Qualification. Record:
- Qualification Name (required) — e.g. EA Level 1 Coach, NCAS Level 2, Pony Club Instructor Certificate, First Aid, Working with Children Check
- Issuing Organisation, Certificate Number, Date Obtained, Expiry Date, Notes
Qualifications with an expiry date show a Valid or Expired badge, and current (non-expired) qualifications are shown on the instructor's public card.
Qualifications can be added but not edited or deleted, and certificate documents cannot be attached. Check the details before you save one — correcting a typo isn't possible from this screen.
Lesson Rates and Deposits
Lesson rates set what each instructor charges for each of your lesson types (create lesson types first under Riding School Landing Page Settings → Lesson Types).
The section changes shape with your pricing mode, because the same rows do two jobs:
| Pricing mode | Section heading | What a row is |
|---|---|---|
| By instructor (the default) | Lesson types & rates — "Set this coach's price for each lesson they take" | The coach's price for that lesson type |
| By lesson type | Lesson types — "Choose which lessons this coach takes" | A single Add / Remove click: does this coach take that lesson or not. A per-instructor price would never be charged, so there is no price dialog |
Either way, these rows are the coach's lesson list, not only a price list. If your school has ticked Only offer a time when a coach who teaches that lesson is working (Settings → Riding School), a lesson type is only offered at a coach's times when it appears here for them. Fill the grid in before you rely on that setting — see Setting Your Riding School Booking Hours.
Open the instructor in edit mode and scroll to the section. You'll see one row per lesson type. Click Set Rate (or Edit) and complete:
- Price (inc. GST) — required. Lesson prices are entered inclusive of GST; enter the figure you want the client to pay. The hint under the field shows your own country's rate (10% in Australia, 15% in New Zealand).
- Active — untick to keep the rate on file without offering it for new bookings
- Requires Full Payment Upfront — the whole price is charged at booking (this overrides deposit settings)
- Requires Deposit — a partial payment at booking with the balance collected after the lesson. Choose a Deposit Type of Percentage (1–99%) or Fixed Amount, and the amount.
Click Save Rate. Rates can be deleted with the Delete button on the row.
Example: Senior instructor — Private Lesson $90, Group Lesson $55; Junior instructor — Private Lesson $70, Group Lesson $45.
My day (the instructor's own view)
Instructors with a linked login open My day (/riding-school/my-day) from their profile menu. It is built for a phone at the arena gate, and has up to four views, chosen from the row of buttons under the title:
- Day — today's lessons in order, with Check in, No show, Complete, a lesson note (typed or dictated) and horse allocation. Confirming, moving, cancelling and taking payment stay with the office.
- Week — their roster shifts and timesheets, if they are also on your staff roster
- Calendar — their lessons on a calendar, and the Calendar Feed: a private iCal/ICS link so their lessons appear in Apple Calendar, Google Calendar or Outlook. See Syncing Your Instructor Calendar to Apple Calendar for step-by-step instructions.
- Availability — the same availability calendar described above, for their own profile
The Calendar and Availability views appear once the instructor is a member of your organisation, which linking their login does for you. See My Day for the full guide.
Until September 2026 these were a separate Instructor Dashboard with four tabs. Its old address still works and opens the Calendar view.
If My day says "You're not set up as an instructor or on a staff roster yet", the signed-in account isn't linked to an instructor profile — check the profile's email matches their login, and that the instructor is still Active.
Public Instructor Listing
When your riding-school landing page is enabled, your site gets an Our Instructors page (/public-instructors) showing every instructor who is Active and Bookable Online, in Display Order — photo, bio, up to two current qualifications, and a Book a Lesson button that starts an online booking with that instructor pre-selected. You can hide the link from your site's navigation with Show "Our Instructors" link in navigation under Riding School Landing Page Settings.
Managing Instructor Status
- Bookable Online off — the instructor disappears from online booking and the public listing, but you can still book them from the Bookings page.
- Active off — the instructor is no longer part of your team: they are hidden from the Instructors list, booking dropdowns and the public listing, and their calendar feed stops working. Their record and booking history are kept. To bring one back, tick Show inactive on the Instructors page, open the instructor and turn Active back on.
-
Delete Instructor (edit page) — opens a dialog that lists exactly what would be affected and offers two choices:
- Make inactive instead — takes them out of online booking and new lessons, and keeps every lesson, rate and note they are named on.
- Delete permanently — removes the instructor for good, with their availability, lesson rates and qualifications. It can't be undone. It is refused while any upcoming lesson is still assigned to them: give those lessons to another instructor (or cancel them) first. Past and cancelled lessons stay in the book with no instructor named, and their staff record stays on the roster with its shifts and timesheets.
Related Articles
- Riding School Setup Guide (End to End) — where instructors fit in your overall setup
- Setting Your Riding School Booking Hours — the organisation-wide hours you can copy into a new instructor's schedule
- Syncing Your Instructor Calendar to Apple Calendar — the personal calendar feed
- Instructor Tier - Solo Instructor Guide — running Horsify as a single instructor
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Client Management — the clients your instructors teach\n\n---\n\nSource:
wiki/features/INSTRUCTOR_MANAGEMENT.md\nLast synced: 2026-10-06 06:11:22 UTC