Adding docks, lifts and other items to a property
Add one item for every physical thing you service at a property — each dock, lift, canopy or raft gets its own record, because completion, notes, photos and billing all happen at the item level, not the property level.
A property with no items is a pin on a map. A property with items is a work list, a price, a set of navigation points and a record of what happened to each thing over years. Items are where LakeOps stops being a customer list and starts being useful.
What counts as an item
One item per thing you physically handle. A 60-foot dock that goes in as one run is one item. Two separate docks are two. A lift and its canopy are usually two, because the canopy often comes off in a different visit with a different crew.
The test is simple: could this be finished on a day when the other one is not? If yes, split it. Per-item status is the whole point — see why work is tracked item by item.
Adding one
Open the property and choose Add item. There are two required fields.
Name
What the crew calls it on the radio. “Dock A”, “Main lift”, “Boat house canopy”. Not “Item 1”. This name appears on the stop screen, in the completed-work report and on the customer’s completion page, so it is worth being literal about.
Type
Dock, lift, canopy, raft — whatever your account uses. Types come from your own list and they do two jobs: they give the item an icon on the map, and they are what your rate card prices against. If a type is missing, add it under Settings → Item types before you add the item.
The two pins
Every item carries an install point and a winter storage point. Place them while you are already looking at the satellite view — that is the whole reason the map is on this form. Dropping install and winter-storage pins covers the details.
Install notes and removal notes
Two separate boxes, because spring and fall are different jobs on the same equipment. The crew only ever sees the one that matches the service they are performing — install notes on a spring stop, removal notes on a fall one. Nobody scrolls past the wrong set in the rain looking for the right one.
Write these for someone who has never been there. “Wheels are seized — bring the bar” or “canopy frame goes on the rack, not the ground” is worth more to a new hand in April than anything else in the record.
Specs, and the one that affects money
An item can carry free-form specs — length, make, model, color, whatever you want to remember. They show on the item and in the crew’s list.
One spec is special. section_count is read by per-section rates, so a dock
recorded with six sections prices as six when your rate card charges by the section. If you
price that way, fill it in; if you do not, ignore it. See
how a job gets priced.
Reference photos
An item holds two permanent photo sets: how it looks in the water, and how it stacks for the winter. These never expire and they are the single best thing you can leave for whoever works that shoreline in five years. See photos.
Retiring an item, and why you cannot delete one
When a customer sells a lift or replaces a dock, you retire the item. There is no delete, on purpose: that lift owns years of job history, notes and photos, and deleting it would take the record of your own work with it.
Retiring is not just a flag. LakeOps also:
- pulls the item out of every standing agreement, so next season does not send a boat for equipment that is not there;
- cancels any agreement that is left with nothing to service, because a job with zero items is a wasted stop;
- removes it from work that has not happened yet, while leaving every completed and skipped line exactly where it is.
Retire in error and you can bring it back. The history was never gone.
Still stuck? Ask us — or go back to the help center.