October 23, 2026
Paying Guides and Camp Staff by the Day
Most outfitters pay their guides and camp help by the day, and most of them work out what’s owed the same way: a calendar, a notebook, and a string of texts. “I cooked the 3rd through the 9th.” “Was the 6th a guided day or a camp day?” By the end of the season the notebook is the record, and it’s the record nobody quite trusts.
Hunt Outfitter now does that arithmetic for you.
A rate for each kind of day
On each guide’s, cook’s or housekeeper’s page there’s a Day pay rates card. Set what you pay them per day, and set it per kind of day: a guided day, a camp day, a cook day, a housekeeping day. A guide who also helps around camp between hunts can have one rate for guiding and another for camp work.
If you change a rate mid-season, days you’ve already recorded keep the rate they were entered at. Guided days are the exception: they’re counted from your schedule (more on that below), so they always use the guide’s current guided-day rate.
Guided days count themselves
You don’t record guided days. They come from your schedule: every day a guide is assigned to a committed hunt counts. A guide who covers two hunts on the same day counts one day, not two. Cancelled hunts, no-shows, holds and hunts still at the quote stage don’t count.
So the guided-day figure is only as good as your guide assignments. If a guide’s name is on the hunt, the day is theirs.
Everything else, recorded in a few taps
Cook days, housekeeping days and camp days get recorded instead. Pick the person, the kind of day and the date range, and Hunt Outfitter adds one entry per day, up to two months at a time. Recording the same day twice doesn’t count it twice.
Or let your staff log their own days
If you’d rather not type everyone’s days yourself, turn on Staff can log their own days in Settings. Your guides, cooks and housekeepers get a My days page in their app, where they pick the dates they worked and submit them.
Nothing they log counts until you approve it. Submitted days wait under Pending days on the Day pay card, where you can approve them one person at a time, reject a day with a reason they’ll see, or approve everything at once. It’s off by default, because not every outfit works this way, and turning it off later doesn’t throw away anything already submitted.
Your staff see their days and whether each one is approved. They don’t see rates or amounts. That conversation stays yours.
What’s owed, for any stretch of the season
The Day pay card under Expenses shows what each person is owed for whatever dates you pick: this week, this hunt, the whole season. Each line shows the days, the rate and the total, broken down by kind of day, and you can export it to a spreadsheet.
A day with no rate set yet is never counted as zero. It’s left out of the total and flagged, so a missing rate is obvious instead of quietly shrinking someone’s number. And if you pay some of your crew in another currency, they get their own line rather than being added into one meaningless sum.
What it isn’t
Day pay tells you what’s owed. It doesn’t pay anyone, file anything, or decide how your staff are classified. Those decisions stay with you and your accountant. It just means the number you start from is right.
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