What a standing seasonal agreement is

Almost every dock company runs on arrangements that nobody writes down twice: the same customers, the same equipment, the same two visits a year, until somebody sells the cabin. The agreement is where LakeOps keeps that.

What is on an agreement

• The property — one shoreline.
• The service — install, removal, whatever your account calls it.
• The term — spring or fall.
• The items — which of that property’s docks, lifts and canopies this arrangement actually covers.

That last one matters more than it looks. A customer might have you install the dock and the main lift every spring while they handle the swim raft themselves. Tick only what you do.

Creating one

From the property, choose to add an agreement, pick the service and the term, and tick the items. LakeOps will not let you save an agreement with no items, and it will not let you save two active agreements for the same property, service and term — that pair is always a mistake and it would generate the same work twice.

Items also have to belong to the property the agreement is on. That is not paperwork; it is the check that stops one customer’s lift ending up on another customer’s job.

What an agreement never holds

Completing a job queues nothing and changes nothing about the agreement. Next season’s work appears when you generate that season, which reads every active agreement and creates one fresh job from each.

The alternative — flipping a completed job back to pending each year — is how most systems do it, and it destroys the history, the prices and the timers along with it. See what a job is.

Canceling

When a customer stops, cancel the agreement and write the reason. That does two things and no more: nothing generates for them again, and every job they ever had stays untouched. You can still open last spring’s job, see what was done, what it cost and what the crew photographed.

Canceling is also how the yearly rollover screen works — unticking somebody there cancels their agreement with the reason you type. See closing a season and rolling into the next.

Changing one mid-life

Add or remove items on the agreement whenever the customer’s equipment changes; the change takes effect the next time you generate. Jobs that already exist are not rewritten — they are a record of what you agreed to at the time.

Retiring an item does the tidying for you: it comes off every agreement automatically, and an agreement left with nothing on it is canceled outright, because sending a boat to service nothing is worse than sending no boat.