Charge on completion: what happens the moment a job closes
LakeOps has no invoicing subsystem: completing a job prices it from your rate card and emails the customer a link to a page showing exactly what was done and what it costs, and any payment is recorded straight against that job.
Most field service software grows an accounting department inside it. LakeOps does not, on purpose. The owner constraint is blunt: no invoice objects, no invoice numbers, no aging buckets, no dunning sequences, no accounting sync.
What completing a job actually does
- Stops any timer still running against it, stamped at the completion time.
- Marks the job complete, by a named person, at a recorded time.
- Prices it from your rate card and snapshots the number — see how a job gets priced.
- Records the completion in the activity log.
- Emails the customer a link, if completion emails are on.
The email fires exactly once. A completion arriving twice off a boat’s offline queue still sends one email — the job itself remembers that it has been sent.
What the customer sees
A page showing their property, every item that was done, what the work came to, and what is still outstanding. There is no login and there never will be — the link in the email is the credential, and it opens that one job and nothing else. Your customers are not going to maintain a password for a dock company, and asking them to is how a payment does not get made.
If LakeOps Payments is switched on and working, that page also carries a pay button. If it is not, the page is still exactly what a customer wants: a plain statement of what was done and what it costs.
Turning the email off
Some shops want to look at the work before the customer does, especially in a first season. Completion emails can be switched off for your whole account — ask us and we will do it. Jobs still complete and still price; nothing goes out to customers, and you work off the completed-work report instead.
Collecting
Two ways, and plenty of shops use both:
- The customer pays online from the completion page, and the money lands in your bank. See LakeOps Payments.
- You get a cheque, cash or a card at your own terminal and record it against the job. See recording a payment by hand.
Either way it is the same payment record, and the job’s balance, the customer’s page and the reports all read it the same way. Nothing in LakeOps asks which one produced it.
Chasing what is outstanding
The completed-work report filters to unpaid work in a date range, and every customer page shows what they have been billed, what they have paid and what is outstanding. That is the whole receivables story, and for a business with a few hundred customers and two visits a year it is genuinely enough.
If you want conventional invoices for a commercial customer who demands one, export the completed-work report as a PDF for that customer and date range.
The argument for building it this way is on getting paid.
Still stuck? Ask us — or go back to the help center.