Charging for an early install or a late removal
Early in and late out are a setting on the customer’s existing service plan — a priority flag and a premium — which is added to each season’s job when it is generated, rolls forward with the plan, and lets you send a crew at only those customers.
Ice goes out on a Thursday and the phone starts. Everybody wants to be first, and with four hundred docks on the book you cannot be. Some customers will pay to be in the first wave; some will pay to leave their lift in past the normal pull date, which is you carrying the weather risk for them. Both are the same thing — a commitment about when — and in LakeOps both are one setting.
Where you set it
On the customer’s service plan, not on the job. Open the plan, set When in the season to Priority, and put the premium in. A spring plan reads as “Early in”; a fall plan reads as “Late out”. It is the same setting seen from the two ends of the year.
Leave the premium blank if you are not charging for it. Blank means exactly that — no premium — which is not the same as zero, and is what you want for the customer of fifteen years you would do it for anyway.
Do not make a second service called “Early install”. It looks like the obvious answer and it goes wrong quietly: a property can then carry two live spring plans, the season generates two jobs for it, and the crew arrives at one dock with two stops on their list while the customer gets billed twice for the same sections.
What the customer pays
The premium is added when the season generates that customer’s job, so it is part of what the work came to — taxed with the work, inside the total on the completion email, and collected like any other money. There is nothing separate to send and nothing extra to chase.
It is stamped at generation on purpose. Raise the premium in May and the jobs already generated in February keep the number they were created with, the same way a job keeps the list of pieces it was created with. What you sold in February is what you bill.
Sending a boat at exactly those customers
That is the half that makes it real. When you send a crew out, set Which customers to Early-in and late-out only and their list contains nothing else — not the standard customers in the same zone, not the ones two bays over. See sending a crew out.
Leave it on Everything on the shoreline and the boat sees the whole pool, early-in customers included. That direction matters: an early-in dock nobody got to in the first wave shows up as ordinary overdue work once the normal run starts, rather than disappearing off every list because it was flagged. The crew card carries a badge for it, so a mixed run still tells them which stop was paid for.
Next year
Nothing to do. The commitment is on the plan and the plan is what rolls forward, so the customer stays early-in every season until you change it. Moving somebody back to standard is editing one field, not canceling and re-creating them.
Still stuck? Ask us — or go back to the help center.