Running the clock on a stop
Each crew member starts and stops their own clock on each stop, and every tap is saved on the device as its own event — so three people on a boat produce three honest timers and a lost signal cannot erase any of them.
On-site minutes are the number everything else leans on: hourly billing, labor costing, and any honest answer to “are we making money on this lake?”. So the clock is built to be impossible to lose.
Using it
Open the stop, press Start the clock when you get to work, press Stop the clock when you leave. The elapsed time shows on the stop while it runs. Both taps are saved on the device first, so a tap with no bars still counts.
Everyone on the boat runs their own
Three people on a stop is three timers, not one shared one. That is the only way to get real labor hours, and it also means nobody has to remember to start the clock “for the crew”.
One person can only have one timer running at a time, and the database enforces it — so a forgotten timer at the last stop cannot quietly run alongside a new one.
Why a timer cannot be lost
Each tap is recorded as its own event, not as a value overwritten on the job. A start is one fact and a stop is another. Nothing can be overwritten by a late sync, and a job interrupted by weather is simply two entries on two days.
The device mints the identifier for a timer at the moment of the tap, which is what lets it stop a timer it started four hours earlier in a dead zone — there is no server round trip in the middle to depend on.
Forgetting to stop one
It happens constantly and LakeOps expects it. Completing the job closes any timer still running against it, stamped at the completion time. The office can also correct an entry afterwards.
What it will not do is silently discard time. If an entry looks wrong, somebody has to decide that on purpose.
What the minutes feed
- Hourly rates. A per-hour rate prices on-site minutes rounded up to the next quarter hour — the increment these shops actually bill in. See how a job gets priced.
- The productivity report. Minutes per item, per crew, per lake — which is where a real price per dock comes from, rather than from what the last guy charged.
- Your own sanity check on which shorelines are quietly costing you a day.
Even if you never bill by the hour, running the clock is worth it for the second and third reasons alone. One season of real timer data will change at least one of your prices.
If the buttons are not there
Running timers is a permission. A role without it gets no clock — and the offline queue checks it too, so it cannot be worked around by going out of range. See permissions.
Still stuck? Ask us — or go back to the help center.