Help center
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.
30 articles
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Getting started
Sign in, load your book of business, and get the map showing something.
- 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, agreement and dollar hangs off the property, so this is the first thing to load.
- Adding docks, lifts and other items to a property An item is one managed physical thing — Dock A, the main lift, the canopy, the swim raft. Per-item records are what make partial days and honest bills possible.
- Dropping install and winter-storage pins Every item carries two points: where it sits in the water for the season, and where it winters on the shoreline. The crew navigates to these, not to the mailbox.
- Setting up your rate card The rate card 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.
Running a season
Standing agreements, generating the work, and what happens when a job closes.
- What a standing seasonal agreement is The agreement is the arrangement that repeats: this property, this service, these items, every spring or every fall, until the customer says stop.
- Opening a season and generating the work Create the season, walk the rollover list, generate. One job per active agreement, and running it twice cannot produce duplicates.
- 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.
- 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. Rollover is the yearly ritual that turns your standing agreements into next year’s work.
On the water
The crew app: the day pack, no signal, timers, items, photos.
- 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.
- Running the clock on a stop Every person on the boat runs their own timer. Taps are recorded as events, not as a column, which is why a dead zone cannot lose one.
- 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.
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.
- 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.
- Charge on completion: what happens the moment a job closes There are no invoices in LakeOps. A job completes, it prices itself, the customer gets an email with a link to what was done, and money comes back against the job.
- LakeOps Payments: letting customers pay online Two modes, one choice. Either customers pay through LakeOps and the money lands in your bank, or you bill them yourself off the completed-work report.
- Recording a cheque, cash or card payment by hand A cheque 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, grouped by customer and property, with what it came to and what has been paid. For a lot of shops this is the billing system.
Your account
People, roles, permissions, settings, and getting your data back out.
- Adding people and giving them a role Four roles come with the account: admin, office, operator and crew. Add someone by email, give them a role, and they sign in with a code like everyone else.
- Permissions and building your own role The four 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 handful of switches that change how the whole account behaves: your business details, the completion email, your default lake, and your payment mode.
- 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.
See it with your own shoreline on the screen
Half an hour. A few of your properties loaded, the pins dropped, a season run through it. If it’s not obviously better than what you’re doing now, that’s the answer you’ll get.