Setting up your rate card
Your rate card is a list of rows under Settings → Rates — each one naming a service, an amount and a unit, plus an item type where the price depends on what the item is — and once it exists, every completed job prices itself.
Everything about money in LakeOps runs off this one list. Get it right once and you will never type a price on a job again.
The shape of a rate
Four fields, and that is the whole model:
- Service — install, removal, repair, whatever your account uses. Required.
- Item type — dock, lift, canopy. Optional; leave it off for a rate that covers the whole job regardless of what is on it.
- Amount — the number.
- Unit — how the number is applied.
The four units
| Unit | What it does |
|---|---|
| Per item | The amount, once, for each item of that type on the job. Two lifts, twice the money. |
| Per section |
The amount multiplied by the item’s own section_count spec. A six-section
dock prices as six. This unit needs an item type, because it has to know whose sections
to count.
|
| Per hour | The amount against on-site minutes from the crew’s timers, rounded up to the next quarter hour. |
| Flat | The amount, once, for the job. |
The card and the overrides
A rate with no customer on it is part of your standard rate card and applies to everybody. The same row with a customer attached is that customer’s price, and it wins for them. That is the whole override mechanism — there are no tiers, no price books and no discount rules to reason about at eleven at night.
Editing a rate never re-prices finished work. A job snapshots its price when it completes. Raise your dock rate next February and every job from last season keeps the number it was actually finished at.
Starting from nothing
An empty rate card is legal. Jobs complete without a price, and the completed-work report shows the work with no money against it — which is fine while you are loading data and useless once you are running.
The fastest honest way in: take the three or four things you do most often, put the number you actually charged the last customer who asked, and refine it after a season of real timer data. Per-hour rates are worth setting even if you do not bill hourly, because they make the productivity report tell you something.
What happens next
Once rates exist, completing a job prices it automatically and — if completion emails are on — sends the customer a page showing exactly what was done and what it came to. The rules for how the rate card is applied are in how a job gets priced, and the money side is in charge on completion.
Still stuck? Ask us — or go back to the help center.