Generate the spring before the water opens

If you’re wondering what setting up a spring in LakeOps involves, here’s the whole answer: one afternoon in February or March, one screen, and at the end of it every seasonal customer’s work sits on a map as a pin — every property, every dock section and lift and canopy, all waiting for a boat. No re-typing April. No spreadsheet resurrected from last year with three rows nobody trusts.

That’s possible because LakeOps already knows the plans. Each customer’s repeating work lives on a service plan — this property, this service, these pieces, every spring — written down once, when they signed up. Spring setup isn’t data entry. It’s a confirmation pass over what’s already there.

Create the season

A season is a term and a year: Spring 2027. You can add start and end dates if you want them as a note — they’re labels, and nothing waits for them. A season marked April 15 doesn’t stop anyone working April 3rd, which matters more than it sounds on a lake where nobody knows when the ice goes.

Walk the list first

The service plans list is every standing arrangement you have: the customer, the property, the lake, how many pieces. Filter it to spring and you are looking at exactly what next season would generate. Your job is the subtraction — the couple who sold the cabin in October, the customer who told you at the gas station he’s “doing it himself this year.”

Tick them, write one line saying why, and press Stop these rolling forward. They won’t show up next year either, and nothing that already happened is touched: every job you ever did for them stays exactly where it is, with its prices and its photos. Got one wrong? Start them again. The list is a place you can change your mind.

The list also shows you something a spreadsheet never did: first season next to anyone you’ve never actually done the work for yet — the customer who signed in the fall for a spring install. Those are the stops where the access notes and the pin placement deserve a second look before a crew ever heads there.

Press generate

One job per remaining customer, each carrying a line for every piece their service plan covers, all pending. If the connection drops or you press it twice, nothing doubles — LakeOps won’t create a second job for the same service plan in the same season, and the screen tells you how many already existed. The details are in generating a season.

Look at the map

This is the moment the afternoon was for. Open the map and the spring is sitting there: a pin at every property with open work, colored by how far along it is — which in March is not at all — with a ring showing what gear each one takes. Zoom into a bay and you’re looking at your April.

Notice what didn’t happen: nobody got assigned anything, and no dates went on any of it. The work sits in a pool until you point a boat at that stretch of water, which is a morning-of decision, made against actual weather. A route built in March doesn’t survive to May, so there isn’t one to build.

And the one who cancels in April?

Stop their service plan — nothing generates for them again. The job that already exists for this spring stays until you cancel it too, which is usually the right order of operations: the service plan ending and this year’s work ending are two separate decisions, and sometimes there’s still a dock on a shoreline that has to go in the water one last time.

What about the customer who signs up in April?

Normal, and no ceremony: add their property and their plan, generate the season again, and only their job is created — running it twice can’t duplicate anyone. A one-off — a repair, a relocation, a first-time install for someone still deciding — is a job on its own, no season or plan behind it, and it rides the same pool as everything else.

What this replaces

Most shops already run a version of this ritual — it’s the February spreadsheet, the one with last year’s tab copied forward and a highlighter column for “confirmed.” The difference isn’t the walk through the list; you still do that, and you should. The difference is what the walk produces. The spreadsheet ends as a spreadsheet, and the real work of turning it into a season — who needs what, where, with which gear — still waits. This pass ends with the season itself: jobs, pieces, pins, ready to be worked and ready to be billed when each one’s done.

What you have when the ice goes

A confirmed list, a season’s work on a map, and nothing left between the water opening and the first stop except launching the boat. The afternoon you spent in February is the reason April starts with work instead of paperwork.