Rural business

IT for farm shops, holiday lets and rural businesses

A farm shop, a wedding barn, a livery yard, a glamping field, a contractor's office. Rural businesses run on technology too, usually in a building the technology was never meant for. Daniel sets up what a town business takes for granted, out here.

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Sound familiar?

What goes wrong

  • The card machine drops when the shop is busiest.

    Which is Saturday morning, when the queue is out of the door and the only connection is a mobile signal shared with everyone in the car park.

  • Guests mention the Wi-Fi in the reviews.

    Not kindly. A holiday let or a glamping site with poor Wi-Fi loses stars, and stars are bookings.

  • Bookings, the till and the accounts don't talk.

    Three systems, three logins, and the figures typed in twice. Most of these can be connected, and the typing stops.

  • There's nobody to ring when it breaks.

    The last IT person was somebody's nephew. He's at university now.

What Daniel does

What he does about it

  1. Connections that hold up under a queue.

    A proper broadband line with a 4G backup, and the card machines and the till on their own network, so a busy car park full of phones can't slow the shop.

  2. Guest Wi-Fi guests will praise.

    Coverage across the let, the barn or the pitches, a simple password or a welcome page, kept separate from your own systems and switched off between bookings if you like.

  3. Tills, bookings and accounts joined up.

    The till that posts to the accounts, the booking system that updates the calendar everywhere, and the stock that counts itself. Daniel connects what you have before suggesting anything new.

  4. Small office networks.

    Shared files, a printer that works, email on your own name and backups that happen, for the estate office, the contractor or the yard.

  5. Support plans with a person on the end.

    A monthly plan that covers remote help, an annual check and a known hourly rate for visits. Or pay as you go. Nobody's tied in.

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What it costs
Under the bonnetFor whoever in the family checks these things.

The kit

  • UniFi networks with separate VLANs for point of sale, staff, guests and cameras
  • Guest Wi-Fi with a captive portal where the business wants it, bandwidth limits so one film doesn't take the site down, and no logging of what guests look at
  • Dual-WAN routers with 4G failover for anywhere a card machine takes money
  • Integrations between booking platforms, tills and accounts through their own supported connections, not fragile workarounds

How it’s done

  • Payment devices isolated from everything else, as the card schemes expect
  • Guest networks that cannot reach the business network under any circumstances
  • Support plans in plain English, with what's included and what's extra written down

Said plainly

What he won't do

  • Build you a website or run your social media. He'll tell you who does that well locally.
  • Lock you into a support contract. Plans run month to month.

Questions people ask

Before you ring

Do you do the farm shop's EPOS system?

He'll connect it, network it and keep it online. The till software itself is supported by its maker; Daniel makes sure the network and the hardware never let it down.

How fast does guest Wi-Fi need to be?

Enough for everyone to stream in the evening without a stutter. That's about the connection and the coverage more than a headline speed, and Daniel plans for the busiest night, not the quietest.

What's in a support plan?

Remote help when something's wrong, an annual visit to check and update everything, and a fixed hourly rate for anything else. The prices page has the detail.

Read first, if you like

Guides that go with this

Also

Jobs that often go together

The card machine that works on Saturday morning. The reviews that mention the Wi-Fi kindly.

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