The operator’s collections guide

Collections in this trade comes with a constraint most collections advice ignores: nearly everyone who owes you money is somebody you want to serve again in May. The customer sixty days behind isn’t a stranger who stiffed you — they’re a family you’ve worked for six years, whose lift you’ll be setting next spring, who shut the cabin in September and genuinely forgot. Chase them like a collections agency and you collect once. Don’t chase them at all and you finance their winter.

So the answer to “who still owes me, and what do I do about it” is a ladder, climbed slowly: know the number, ask well the first time, remind, put it in writing, put a price on lateness, and only then pick up the phone. Each rung has its moment, and most debts never see the second rung.

First, know the number

You can’t collect what you can’t see. The list you need shows every customer with money outstanding, most owed first, each unpaid job underneath with how many days old it is, and four buckets across the top: 0–30, 31–60, 61–90, over 90.

Worth knowing what the list leaves out, so you can trust what’s on it: an open job isn’t debt — it’s work, and it has no price until it closes. A canceled job isn’t debt. A job you priced at zero — a warranty return, a goodwill call — isn’t debt. What remains is real: finished, priced work, minus what’s been collected against it.

Rung one: the ask that doesn’t feel like chasing

Most collections problems are created weeks before anyone thinks about collecting, by a slow or vague first ask. The first ask should go out the day the work finishes — an email showing every piece handled, the crew’s photos, the amount, and a way to pay. Sent that day, it isn’t chasing at all; it’s the natural end of the job, and it’s the rung that collects most of the season’s money on its own. If your asks go out at month-end, fix that before building anything else — every later rung works better when the clock starts at the dock.

Rung two: the reminder nobody has to remember

A few customers need asking twice, and asking twice is a job nobody in a dock shop wants. LakeOps will do it on a schedule — but only after you switch it on. No account mails its customers because software got installed; that’s a decision an owner makes.

Turned on, the default is a note at 14, 30 and 45 days, and you can set your own steps — up to six — and cap how many any one customer ever gets. The schedule has manners built in. A customer only ever moves forward through it: part-pay and the next note is the next step, never a repeat. Pay in full and they’re done, because there’s nothing left to chase. Already 60 days behind when you first switch it on? One note, at the furthest step passed — not three nights of catch-up. And a customer whose card you’re already in the middle of charging is skipped entirely, because chasing somebody for money you’re taking is how you lose a customer who did nothing wrong.

Rung three: put it in writing

Somewhere past sixty days, a reminder email stops being enough and it’s time to put the whole position in front of them: a statement. One page — every unpaid job, oldest first, with the date the work was done and how long ago that was, anything already paid, any late fee on its own line, one total. If you take payments through LakeOps, one link pays the lot (the 1.0% service fee shows as its own line; billing customers yourself is always welcome and carries no fee).

A statement restates work you’ve already told them about — sending it twice creates nothing and files nothing. And the scheduled reminders above are this same document with a sentence of chase on the front, so the numbers can never disagree between the one you send by hand and the one that goes out on its own.

Rung four: a price on lateness

A late fee is a normal term of trade, and its job is to change behavior, not to make money. Switched on, it applies itself past the age you set — but the policy travels ahead of it: once fees are on, every statement carries a sentence stating your terms, so a fee somebody can fairly be asked to pay is one they could have read about first.

Two details do the relationship-keeping here. The fee is always its own line — a charge for money being late, never folded into the price of the work, so what the job cost is what the completion email said, forever. And when you waive one for a good customer — which you will, and often should — it stays waived. It doesn’t creep back the next night to undo what you told them on the phone, and the waiver is remembered, so next fall you can see you’ve been gracious with this customer before.

The top rung is a phone call

Software runs out of rungs at ninety days, and it should. Sort the over-90 bucket by amount and start calling, biggest first. The call is almost never a confrontation — it’s “checking in before the season wraps up”, and what it surfaces is usually a reason: the statement’s going to a dead email, the cabin sold in August, there’s a dispute nobody voiced. Each has a fix, and none of them was going to fix itself by aging.

Make the call with the customer’s record open: what was done, what the photos show, what they’ve paid over the years. A six-year customer with one slow fall gets a different conversation than a first-year customer at ninety days — and having the history in front of you is what keeps the tone right.

It works whichever way you bill

None of this assumes customers pay you online. A shop that mails its own bills and banks its own checks gets the same aging, the same statements, the same ladder — recording each check against its job is what keeps the list honest, since no bank feed is doing it for you. If anything, the self-billing shop needs the list more.

The whole guide in five lines

Ask the day the work finishes. Let the reminders run on a schedule you chose. Put the position on one page past sixty days. Price lateness, announced first, waived gracefully. And past ninety, call — biggest first, history open, May in mind.

Who owes you money · Sending a statement · Payment reminders · Late fees