Running the clock on a stop

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.

If your boat has an operator you will not see those buttons — you will see who is running your clock instead. That is the crew clock, and your hours are recorded exactly the same way.

One timer per person, however it gets started

Three people on a stop is three timers, not one shared one. That is the only way to get real labor hours, and it is true whether each of them tapped their own clock or the operator tapped once for the boat.

Who does the tapping depends on the deployment. If dispatch named an operator, that person starts and stops one clock at each stop and it records time for everyone aboard — and the crew do not run their own clocks while they are on that boat. If no operator was named, everybody runs their own, which is what the buttons above describe. See the crew clock.

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

The phone can stop a timer it started four hours earlier in a dead zone — starting and stopping never needs a connection in between.

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 look at it and decide.

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 taps sent in later are checked the same way, so it cannot be worked around by going out of range. See permissions.