What a job cost you, and which shorelines are worth working
Enter an operator hourly cost and a deck hourly cost, and every job carries what it cost to do alongside what it billed — rolled up by zone and by run so you can see which shorelines and which crews actually pay.
You know what a job billed. The question that decides next year’s price list is what it cost — and the answer has been sitting in the app all along, because every stop your crew clocked is one row per person per visit. All that was missing was what an hour costs you.
The two numbers
In Settings → Account, under What an hour costs you:
- An operator hour — wage, burden, everything. Used for a person on a day they ran a boat.
- A deck hour — everybody else aboard.
Two rates rather than one per person, deliberately. You hire six in April and keep two in July; a cost per head is a payroll system you would have to maintain, and the distinction the trade actually makes is between the person running the boat and the people on it.
Each boat can carry its own hourly cost too, on the equipment record — fuel, the trailer, the hours on the engine. Leave it blank and you get labor-only costing, which is honest.
Why the boat’s hours are not the crew’s hours
Three crew alongside for two hours is six hours of labor and two hours of boat. You paid three people; there was one barge and it was tied up once. LakeOps counts them separately, because adding the boat up the way you add up the crew would report three times the fuel and look entirely reasonable.
This works because of how the clock is started: one tap by the operator opens a timer for everybody aboard, so the app knows they were the same span of the same day rather than three unrelated visits.
What the report tells you
What the work was worth is billed minus cost, for every completed job in a window, and then rolled up two ways:
- By zone — which shorelines to keep and which to price differently. A bay forty minutes from the landing does not look expensive on any other screen in the app.
- By run — one boat, one day, one crew. Two crews on the same lake can differ by half, and this is where you see it.
- The jobs that barely paid, worst first. Each one is either priced wrong or takes longer than anybody realised, and both are worth knowing.
Every job’s own figure is on the job page as well, next to what it billed. It exports to CSV like every other report.
What it will not do
It will not invent a cost. A job worked before you entered your rates reads as zero, and the report says on the page that no rates are set rather than letting the margins pass for profit. Work that finished without a price on it is counted and named rather than quietly left out — a margin that excludes unbilled work is a comfortable lie.
And it is a costing figure, not accounting. Overhead, the yard, the truck and the office are not in it. Use it to compare jobs, zones and crews against each other, and use the price list to act on what it tells you.
Still stuck? Ask us — or go back to the help center.