Closing a season and rolling into the next

A season is a bucket with a term and a year — Spring 2027 — and it has three states. Knowing what each one means saves a lot of guessing in the spring.

Upcoming, open, closed

State	Means
Upcoming	Created, nothing generated yet. A placeholder you can plan against.
Open	Jobs have been generated into it. This is where the work lives while you do it.
Closed	Finished, and the accounting record for that year. Nothing further can be generated into it.

When to close a season

Close it when the work is genuinely done and you have collected what you are going to collect — usually a few weeks after the last boat comes off the water, once the completed-work report for that season has stopped changing.

Closing does not hide anything. Every job, price, photo and payment stays exactly where it is and stays reportable. What it does is stop the season being a live target: no new generation can drop work into a year you have already accounted for.

Generating is a different thing from closing

People mix these up. Closing ends a season — it is the statement that a year is finished. Generating creates the next one’s work from the service plans that are rolling forward. They are separate buttons on separate years and neither implies the other.

Keeping them separate is what lets you prepare next spring in February while last fall is still open and unpaid — which is exactly when most shops actually do it.

There is no separate screen for it. Choose Seasons in the sidebar, which opens the running season lake by lake, and switch to Season details — or pick another year from the season box, or All seasons for the list. If anything is waiting to be made, the season details say how many and offer the button. The detail is in opening a season and generating the work.

The annual rhythm

1. Late winter — stop whoever canceled on the service plans list, create the spring season, generate.
2. Spring — deploy crews, work the pool, jobs complete and price themselves.
3. Early summer — collect on the stragglers off the completed-work report, then close the spring season.
4. Late summer — create the fall season and do it again. Fall service plans are separate from spring ones and often cover different items.

Mid-season changes

Customers sign up in April and cancel in October; that is the trade. Add the service plan and generate the season again — only the missing jobs are created, never duplicates. Cancel a service plan and its jobs that have not started yet, in any season that is still open, are canceled with it. A job the crew has already started or finished stays exactly as it is, because that is work somebody did. If they still want this fall’s removal before they go, add it as a one-off job: somebody still has to go get their dock out.

Reading a season afterwards

Every report takes a date range, and the completed-work report groups by customer and property — so a closed season is a finished, exportable picture of a year. See the completed-work report and getting your data back out.