Getting started: your first season

Everything in LakeOps hangs off something you set up earlier, so the order matters: prices before jobs can bill, lakes before properties can be placed, items before a season has anything to generate. This is that order, one step at a time. Loading your book costs nothing — you aren’t billed anything until a season generates real work — and the dashboard keeps a checklist of how far along you are until the setup is done.

1. Set the account basics

Under Settings → Account & payments: your company name, your time zone, and the one decision with reach — whether customers pay online through LakeOps or you bill them yourself off the completed-work report. You can change your mind later. See account settings worth knowing about.

2. Check your services and item types

A new account already speaks the trade: it comes with the five usual services — spring install, fall removal, repair, relocate, new install — and the common equipment types, from sectional docks to vertical lifts, canopies and swim rafts. Walk through Settings → Services and Settings → Item types and rename or add until the words match the ones your shop uses on the radio.

3. Build your price list

Under Settings → Prices, one row per rate: a service, an amount, a unit, and an item type where the price depends on what the thing is. You only do this once — afterwards, every completed job prices itself. The details are in setting up your price list.

4. Add your lakes and zones

Under Settings → Lakes & zones, add the water you actually work, and cut each lake into zones — a zone is a stretch of shoreline a boat can realistically work in a day. Zones are how you’ll point boats at work all season, so name them the way your crews already talk: the narrows, the north arm, Daisy Bay.

5. Load customers and properties

The customer is who pays; the property is one shoreline. If your list already lives in a spreadsheet, import it — one CSV loads the whole book. Otherwise add the customer first, then each property from the customer’s own page, with its lake and zone. Either way, drag each map pin to where the dock actually is — a geocoder puts a lake house at the road, and your crew arrives by water.

6. Add the equipment and place its pins

On each property, add one item per physical thing you service — each dock, each lift, the canopy, the raft. Give every item its two map points: where it sits in the water for the season, and where it winters on shore. This is the slow step, and the one that pays: a property with no items generates an empty stop, and a crew navigating to a pin you never placed is a crew idling offshore reading a mailbox number.

7. Create the service plans

From each property, record the standing arrangement: which service, spring or fall, covering which of that property’s items. This is the part of setup that repays itself every year from now on — the plan is what each season generates from, so April never gets re-typed again.

8. Invite your people

Under Settings → People, add everyone by email with a role — admin, office, operator or crew. There are no per-user charges and no seats, so invite the whole shop; the first time somebody’s left off to save a seat, half the season stops being recorded. Operators and crew get the crew app on their phones.

9. Generate the season

Create the season, walk the rollover list, and generate. LakeOps creates one job per active service plan and the map lights up with pins — your whole spring, visible at once. Nothing is assigned to anybody: when the ice goes out, you send a boat at a shoreline and the crew takes what’s waiting there.