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Every screen in LakeOps, explained by someone who knows what a fork barge is. Start at the top if you are new; use the search if you are not.
74 articles
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Getting started
Sign in, load your customers and properties, and get the map showing something.
- Getting started: your first season The setup order for a new account — settings, prices, lakes, customers, items, service plans — ending at the button that generates your first season.
- Signing in to LakeOps LakeOps has no passwords. You type your email, we send a six-digit code, and the code signs you in. Here is what to do when it does not arrive.
- Adding your customers and their properties A customer is who pays. A property is one shoreline. Every job, pin, service plan and dollar hangs off the property, so this is the first thing to load.
- Importing your customer list One CSV loads your whole book — customers, properties, even the equipment columns — then walks you through putting every pin at the water.
- Adding docks, lifts and other items to a property An item is one managed physical thing — Dock A, the main lift, the canopy. Per-item records make partial days and honest bills possible.
- Dropping install and winter-storage pins Every item carries two points: where it sits in the water, and where it winters on shore. The crew navigates to these, not to the mailbox.
- Setting up your price list The price list is one list of prices: a service, optionally an item type, an amount, and a unit. Add rates once and every completed job prices itself.
- Your request form One public form per shop: a link, a QR code, or embedded in your website. Requests land in the office and become a customer and a property when you accept.
- Bulk editing your book Move properties between lakes, zones and tax groups, or retire, restore and re-type equipment — forty at a time, applied to exactly what you filtered.
Running a season
Service plans, generating the work, and what happens when a job closes.
- What a service plan is The service plan is the arrangement that repeats: this property, this service, these items, every spring or every fall, until the customer says stop.
- Charging for an early install or a late removal Some customers pay to be in the first wave, or to leave the lift in past the normal pull. One setting, and a boat you can send at just them.
- Opening a season and generating the work Create the season and press generate. One job per service plan that is rolling forward, and running it twice cannot produce duplicates.
- When ice-out moves the season The thaw is three weeks late and the season says April 15. What changes in LakeOps? Nothing — no work is pinned to a day.
- Working a season lake by lake Mark where each lake stands, see who is still open there, and say when you are done with it. Spring and fall each get their own stages.
- Skipping a season without canceling the plan The customer is renovating this year and back the next. Stopping their service plan stops it for good — here is the way to skip exactly one year.
- What a job is, and why it never comes back A job is one occurrence: one property, one service, one visit’s worth of items. It is finished forever when it completes — next season gets a new one.
- Creating a one-off job A repair in July, a relocate, a first install — work belonging to no service plan and no season. Create it directly; it flows like any job.
- Fixing mistakes: what can be corrected, and how A job closed too early, a wrong price, a stray tick, a bad clock entry — the playbook for each, and why every fix adds a record instead of rewriting one.
- Why work is tracked item by item Job status is derived from the items, never set beside them. Three of five items done is a real, recordable state — and it is most days.
- Closing a season and rolling into the next Closing a season locks it as the accounting record for that year. Generating is the separate step that turns your service plans into next year’s work.
- Trying a season without generating it A dry run is the season page with nothing created: the count, the shorelines with no plan yet, and the bill. Nothing is charged, no clock starts.
On the water
The crew app: the day pack, no signal, timers, items, photos.
- Wind on the chart A small arrow and a number on the operator’s chart and beside the dispatch map: the wind on that lake right now, turning with the boat in follow-me.
- The crew app: what it is and how to open it The same sign-in, a different surface. Big targets, a live chart, and everything the boat needs already on the device.
- The day pack: getting your day before you leave the dock One tap on shore downloads every stop, item, pin, note and phone number the crew could need. It is the floor under a day with no signal.
- Working with no signal Timers, completions and notes are recorded on the device and replayed when the bars come back. What survives, what waits, and how to tell which.
- When a device didn’t sync: finding missing field work The crew finished the north arm; the office sees half. The triage order — what landed, what the phone still holds, what is truly at risk.
- Running the clock on a stop How on-site minutes are recorded, and why a dead zone cannot lose one. Taps are events, not a column — which is what makes an offline clock safe.
- The crew clock: one tap for the whole boat The operator starts and stops one clock at each stop and it records time for everyone aboard. Each person still gets their own hours.
- Marking items done, and skipping the ones you cannot do Tap Mark done on each item as you finish it. Skipping is allowed and it demands a reason, because a skip is a billing exception.
- Photos: reference shots and proof of this visit Two kinds of photo, doing two different jobs. One set is permanent institutional memory; the other is proof of a single visit and ages out.
- Repointing a crew when the weather turns Wind comes up, you send the boat to the lee side, and nothing has to be unwound — because the work was never assigned to that boat in the first place.
- Ending a deployment, and recalling a crew How a crew ends their day from the water, how dispatch recalls them, and what happens to unfinished work — nothing, because it was never held.
Dispatch and the map
Deployments, zones, gear requirements, and what the pin colors mean.
- Deploying a crew for the day Pick the gear, the people, the lake, the zones and the services. That is the whole dispatch decision — the crew takes whatever is pending where they land.
- Seeing where your crews are today Fleet shows every boat out today, where it is, and how far through the day — so you can answer a customer without calling the crew.
- Lakes and zones: cutting big water into dispatchable pieces A zone is a stretch of shoreline a boat can realistically work in a day. Membership is a choice a human makes, never a spatial guess.
- Equipment types and what gates a piece of work Some lifts need the crane. Some bays will not take the big barge. LakeOps knows what a crew brought and tells them plainly what they cannot do today.
- Reading the map: what every pin color means Gray, slate, amber, green — the fill says how far along the property is, and the ring says what gear it takes to finish.
Money
Rates, pricing, getting paid, and the report that stands in for invoicing.
- How a job gets priced Item rates first, service rate as the fallback, per-section reads the item’s own spec, hourly rounds up to the quarter hour — and the number is snapshotted.
- What a job cost you, and which shorelines are worth working The clocks your crew already ran, times what an hour costs you. Margin per job, per zone and per run — and what it will not pretend to know.
- Charge on completion: what happens the moment a job closes There are no invoices. A job completes, prices itself, and the customer gets an email with a link to what was done and a way to pay.
- The export your bookkeeper wants No QuickBooks sync, on purpose. The revenue report exports one row per completed job, tax on its own line: what a bookkeeper imports as sales receipts.
- LakeOps Payments: letting customers pay online Customers pay online by bank or card and the money lands in your own Stripe account, or you bill them yourself. Turning it on, the panel, and pausing.
- Setting up LakeOps Payments: what Stripe asks for What to have ready before you turn on LakeOps Payments, what LakeOps fills in for you, what Stripe asks, and what the settings panel says while Stripe checks.
- The LakeOps Payments fee, worked through The LakeOps Payments service fee, worked through: charged on the amount before sales tax, rounded to the cent, and separate from Stripe’s fee.
- Bank payments: how long they take, and when one fails ACH in the US and pre-authorized debit in Canada take days to clear. What your customer sees meanwhile, and what happens when a bank payment comes back.
- Refunds, and who pays the fees Refund from LakeOps or in your Stripe dashboard and the matching share of our fee comes back. Stripe keeps its fee either way.
- Disputes and chargebacks A customer disputing a LakeOps Payments charge with their bank: whose dispute it is, the evidence deadline, what LakeOps records, and what a dispute costs.
- Your name on checkout, receipts and card statements Your logo, color, support details and statement name: where they show, which follow you to Stripe automatically, and which you change in Stripe after setup.
- LakeOps Payments in Canada Billing in Canadian dollars, pre-authorized debit, a Canadian Stripe account and CAD payouts — and why what you pay LakeOps is still in US dollars.
- 1099-K forms and card security Stripe, not LakeOps, sends any 1099-K for LakeOps Payments. Card numbers are typed on Stripe’s page and never reach LakeOps, which keeps it in PCI SAQ A.
- Recording a check, cash or card payment by hand A check handed over at the dock is a first-class payment. Record it against the job and the balance, the report and the customer page all update.
- The completed-work report Everything finished in a date range, by customer and property, with what it came to and what has been paid. For many shops this is the billing.
- Who owes you money, and for how long The balances report ages every unpaid job from the day the work was finished, buckets it, and works the same whether or not you take payments through LakeOps.
- Sending a customer a statement One page listing everything a customer still owes, aged, with a single link to pay the lot. Not an invoice, and not the same thing as a receipt.
- Chasing late payers automatically Off until you switch it on. Then a statement goes out at 14, 30 and 45 days by default, once each, and only ever moving forward through the schedule.
- Charging a late fee A normal term of trade in this business. Off by default, stated on the statement before it is ever charged, its own line on the bill, and waivable.
- Canceling your subscription Canceling stops your plan renewing. It does not delete anything, does not stop you working tomorrow, and is reversible until the term ends.
- When your LakeOps payment fails What happens when the charge for your LakeOps plan fails: the emails, the retries, what pauses once they run out, and how to unpause.
- Closing your account and deleting your data Close the account yourself and have everything destroyed after thirty days. What goes, what does not, and why there is no undo afterwards.
- Payouts: when the money actually lands Your customers pay your own Stripe account, not LakeOps, so payouts run on Stripe's schedule. What that means for card versus bank, and where to look.
- What your customer can see No login, ever. Three pages open from links in their email: the job that was just done, their account, and everything they have on the water.
- Quoting what the crew spotted A flag on the piece, a price from you, a yes or no from the customer by email. No estimate documents — the answer is what creates the job.
- Finding a receipt and sending it again "I never got the receipt" is the most common call an office takes about money. Look the payment up, read the receipt, download it or send it again.
- A customer’s payment history Every payment one customer has ever made, on one page — what it paid for, what came back as a refund, what is still outstanding, and every receipt.
- Sales tax: you decide what is taxable, not us LakeOps never decides whether your work is taxable. You set the rates, you mark which services they apply to, and a property is taxed by a stack of them.
- Keeping a card on file A customer can save a card while paying, and it is charged automatically when the next job closes. They can take it off again without signing in to anything.
- Every email your customer can get Eight emails can reach your customer, plus a pay-link text where available — each caused by something concrete, each in your company’s name. The map.
- What LakeOps costs, and how the count works You pay for the properties you serviced in the last 12 months. The first 100 are included in $199 a month. Here is exactly what counts and what does not.
Your account
People, roles, permissions, settings, and getting your data back out.
- Asking customers for a review Paste your Google and Facebook review links once, turn it on, and every customer email ends with one line pointing at a page that offers both.
- Adding people and giving them a role Five roles come with the account: owner, admin, office, operator and crew. Add someone by email, give them a role, and they sign in with a code.
- Permissions and building your own role The five built-in roles cannot be edited, on purpose. When they do not fit, you build a role out of the permission list instead.
- Account settings worth knowing about The settings that change how the whole account behaves: your business details, what your customers see, completion emails, and how you take payment.
- Restoring something you archived Customers, properties, lakes, zones, services and equipment never delete — they archive or retire, and one screen under Settings puts them back whole.
- Getting your data back out Every report exports to CSV, and the completed-work report also renders a PDF. Here is exactly what each export contains and what it is good for.
Put your own shoreline on the screen
Create the account yourself, import your customer list, drop a few pins, and you’re looking at your own water this afternoon. No sales call, no setup fee, and nothing charged until your first season generates work.
No card, no sales call, nothing to book — you're in within a minute. Send us a question if you'd rather ask a person first.