Collect the spring while the water’s warm
Install season ends with a burst of work and a tail of money. Here’s the one-afternoon June pass — oldest debts first, one statement per straggler, reminders on a schedule — that closes out spring before summer buries it.
· 5 min read
The last dock of the spring went in two weeks ago, the barge is finally quiet, and it feels like the season is over. It isn’t — it just changed shape. What’s left of spring isn’t on the water. It’s a short list of finished jobs that haven’t been paid for yet, and every week you leave it alone it gets harder to collect.
Closing it out is one June afternoon. Pull up who owes you, oldest first. Send a statement to the few who are behind. Switch the reminders on so July doesn’t repeat the exercise. That’s the whole sweep, and here it is step by step.
Most of it already came in on its own
If your bills went out the day the work was done — the email with the pieces listed, the crew’s photos and a button to pay — most customers paid within days, while the dock was still the newest thing at the cabin. The June sweep isn’t about them. It’s about the tail: the customer who’s traveling, the one who meant to mail a check, the one who genuinely forgot.
That tail is small, which is exactly why it slips. Nobody builds an afternoon around eight customers. Build this one anyway, because those eight are carrying a meaningful chunk of your spring revenue between them.
Oldest first, not biggest first
A debt ages from the day the work was finished — which is also the day the customer got their email, so the clock and their memory start together. The balance that matters most isn’t the largest one. It’s the oldest one, because willingness to pay fades a little every week and the sixty-day mark is where “I’ll get to it” becomes “did I already pay that?”
In LakeOps, the balances report is that list: every customer with money outstanding, most owed first, each unpaid job underneath with its age in days, bucketed 0–30, 31–60, 61–90 and over 90. In early June, almost everything sits in the first bucket. Your afternoon is about whatever doesn’t.
Note what’s not on the list. An open job isn’t debt — it’s work, and it has no price until it closes. So before the sweep, close out the stragglers: the job that’s done on the water but still has one unticked item, the repair that finished Friday. Money can’t age until the work is finished.
One statement per straggler
For anyone past thirty days, send a statement. It’s one page: every job they haven’t paid for, oldest first, with the date the work was finished and how many days ago that was, anything already paid against it, one total — and one link that pays the lot, if you take payments through LakeOps.
It’s not an invoice — nothing is numbered, nothing gets filed, and sending it twice creates nothing. It restates work you already told them about, in writing, with today’s date on it. For the customer who meant to pay, that’s all it takes. Open the customer, press send, move to the next one. Eight customers is ten minutes.
Then let the reminders do July
The part of collections that actually costs you isn’t June — it’s remembering to do this again in three weeks. Reminders take that over: by default a debt gets a note at 14, 30 and 45 days old, and you can set your own steps, up to six, and cap how many any one customer ever gets.
They’re off until you turn them on — no account starts mailing its customers because a feature exists. And the schedule behaves the way you would: a customer already sixty days behind when you switch it on gets one note, not three in a row working up to where they already are. A customer who part-pays moves forward through the steps, never back. A customer whose card on file is about to be charged gets skipped entirely, because chasing somebody for money you’re in the middle of taking loses a customer who did nothing wrong.
What goes out is the same statement with a sentence of chase in front of it — one document, so the reminder and the statement can never disagree about the total.
The phone call is still the last rung
A statement and two reminders will bring in nearly everyone. Whoever’s left after that gets a phone call, and the call is easy because you’re holding the record: what was done, when, what it came to, what the photos show. You’re not arguing about the work — it’s all written down. You’re just asking about the money, and these are customers you’ll be pulling a dock for in September, so ask the way you’d want to be asked.
What the afternoon buys you
Spring closed while summer is still slow. When the fall list gets locked in August, you want last season to be a finished number, not an open question — and you want the reminder schedule already running so the fall’s own tail takes care of itself. One afternoon in June is what that costs.
How getting paid works in LakeOps · How dock companies get paid without an invoicing system