Why work is tracked item by item
Every item on a job carries its own status, so a visit that finishes three docks and leaves two lifts for the crane crew is recorded exactly that way, and the job’s own status is calculated from its items rather than typed by anyone.
Ask any dock company what the most expensive unfixed problem in their operation is and you will hear some version of: nobody knows exactly what got finished yesterday. Per-item status is the answer to that, and it shapes almost every screen in LakeOps.
Three states, per item
| State | Means |
|---|---|
| Pending | Nobody has touched it. It is still work. |
| Completed | Done, by a named person, at a recorded time. |
| Skipped | Deliberately not done, with a written reason. Not billed. This is your exception trail. |
LakeOps will not let an item be skipped without a reason. A skip is a billing decision as much as an operational one, and “why is this not on the bill” is a question somebody will ask in November.
The job follows the items
Job status is derived, never typed. One item resolved makes the job in progress; all of them resolved makes it complete. There is no way to have a job that says “done” sitting on top of items that say otherwise, because there is nowhere to type that.
What this actually buys you
The handoff stops living in someone’s head
Tuesday’s crew put the dock in and left the lift because they did not have the crane. Thursday the crane barge is on that lake. It sees one item pending at that property, not a job that is either finished or not.
The map tells the truth from a distance
A property pin turns amber the moment some — but not all — of its open work is done. From the office you can see at a glance which shorelines somebody has already been to and left half finished. See reading the map.
The bill matches the work
Pricing runs per item. Skip a lift because the water was too low and it does not price. The customer’s completion page and the completed-work report both show the item lines, so nobody has to reconstruct anything.
Two crews on one property is a normal state, not a conflict. The thing being contended is the item, and two crews rarely do the same item. Each marks what they did.
Completed work is never un-completed
Once an item is marked done, nothing later undoes it — not a sync arriving late from a boat that has been out of range since morning, not a second crew’s update. A completion is a fact about the world, and a system that quietly reverses one is a system nobody can trust with a billing question.
If something genuinely was not finished, the office corrects it deliberately, with a person behind the decision.
How crews do it
One tap per item on the stop screen, as they finish it — not a batch at the end of the day, and not from memory in the truck. See marking items done.
Still stuck? Ask us — or go back to the help center.