Adding your customers and their properties

LakeOps keeps these separate because they answer different questions. The customer is who gets the email and who owes the money. The property is where the boat goes. One customer can own several properties, and one property can hold a dozen items.

Adding the customer

Under Customers → New customer. The only hard requirement is a last name or a company name — that covers both a household and an association or marina. Add the email and phone while you are there: the email is where completion messages go, and the phone is what the crew taps when they are sitting off a shoreline that does not look right.

The billing address on a customer is the mailing address. It is often nowhere near the lake, which is exactly why it lives on the customer rather than on the property.

Adding the property

Add properties from the customer’s own page rather than from a general list — that way the customer link is already made and cannot be missed.

Address lookup

Start typing the street address and pick the suggestion; the street, city, state and ZIP fill themselves in. If your account has not had address lookup switched on, the form says so and you type the fields in by hand — nothing else changes.

Nickname

Optional, and worth using. This is what the crew calls the place on the radio. If you leave it blank, LakeOps shows the street address everywhere instead.

Lake and zone

The lake is required. Everything about dispatch — which boat, which ramp, which day — starts from which water a property is on. The zone is optional: it splits a big lake into stretches a crew can work in a day. On small water, leave it blank. See lakes and zones.

The pin, and why you should move it

Geocoding an address puts the pin on the driveway or the mailbox. For dock work that is the wrong side of the house. Drag the pin to the shoreline — where the boat actually comes in.

You can also draw a boundary around the property on the same map. It is not used for dispatch decisions — it just gives the crew’s chart an outline so they can see where one place ends and the next begins.

Access notes earn their keep

Access notes ride along in the crew’s day pack and show up in an amber box on the stop, offline, before anybody arrives. Write the thing that costs you an hour when a new crew member does not know it:

• “Approach from the east — big rock roughly 20 feet off the end of the dock.”
• “No-wake the whole bay. Do not cut the point.”
• “Neighbor’s lift sits close on the north side; come in square.”

Office notes are the other box, for things the crew does not need: billing quirks, who to ring about a gate code, why this customer is on a different rate.

Loading every customer at once

If your list already lives in a spreadsheet, don’t type it — import it. One CSV loads customers, properties and even equipment, and ends in a pin queue for putting every property at the water. Adding by hand is for the trickle afterwards: the new customer who calls in April.

If you do load by hand, two things make it much faster:

• Do one lake at a time. The lake and zone fields stop being a decision after the first few.
• Add the property first and the items later. A property with no items is a perfectly valid row, and adding items is the part that wants the satellite view and a bit of patience.