For dock and boat lift companies
LakeOps is software for companies that install and remove docks, boat lifts and shoreline equipment on lakes and rivers. Every section, lift, canopy and raft you service is its own line — pinned where it goes in the water and where it stacks for the winter — so the next boat knows what the last one got through. It keeps working past the last bar of signal. $199 a month, everybody in the shop included.
No setup fee. Bring whatever you’re running the business on now — a spreadsheet, an old invoice list, even a legal pad — and import your book of business into it.
You’re not disorganized. You know your book better than any software will. The trouble is that nobody else does — not the crew on the far side of the lake, not whoever answers the phone at four on a Friday, and not the kid who started Tuesday. Here’s where that costs you.
It’s the same customers, the same lifts, the same sections, in and out, year after year. So why does the season start with a week of re-typing? In LakeOps the standing arrangement for each property is what carries forward. You open a season and the work is already there — every customer, every piece, install and removal.
Right now the only thing connecting Tuesday to Thursday is somebody’s memory, and it usually gets there as a text nobody sent. Every section, lift and canopy is its own line here, so Thursday’s crew sees a part-done property before they tie up — instead of walking the shoreline guessing what got left.
Ice-out moves three weeks year to year, a north wind closes the exposed side with no notice, and half your customers call the week they arrive. So there’s no calendar in this. You send a boat at a stretch of shoreline and it takes whatever’s waiting there. When the wind turns, you move the boat — there’s nothing to unassign, because nothing was ever assigned.
Your crews work where there’s no signal, most of the day, most of the season. The day loads onto the phone before they leave the landing, and everything they tap after that — the pieces they set, the notes, the clock — is recorded on the device and lands in the office when the boat comes back around the point. Photos are the one thing that needs bars.
The record
A property isn’t an address. It’s six dock sections, a lift, a canopy and a swim raft, and each one has two places it lives: the spot it sits in the water, and the spot it stacks in October. Drop those pins once and a hand who’s never seen the place can find every piece of it. Add a photo of each state and he can see what it’s supposed to look like when he’s done.
On the water
Big buttons, wet gloves, one hand on a moving boat. The hand who sets the dock marks the dock — because if whoever’s running the boat has to tap seventeen pieces at the end of the day, he’ll do it from memory in the truck and the record’s fiction by Friday.
Sending boats out
Barge 1, two hands, the north arm, installs. That’s the whole setup and it takes a minute. They get handed everything still waiting on that water and they work down it. What they get through depends on the weather and what they find, which is how it already works — the software just stops pretending otherwise.
Getting paid
No invoice numbers. No aging buckets. No accounting sync to keep alive. The job closes, it’s priced off your own rate card, and the customer gets an email listing exactly what was done at their place — six sections in, lift and canopy set — with the crew’s photos and a button to pay.
Seven reports, all of them exportable, built out of what your own crews recorded — not out of anybody’s estimate.
How much is left, how fast it’s going down, and which bays it’s sitting in.
Billed against collected, by month and by service, and who still owes you.
Minutes per piece, per stop, per person, off your crews’ own clocks. It’s the number a season gets priced from, and almost nobody has it.
Customers with equipment still in your water and nothing standing for next season. That’s a phone call.
LakeOps is a small shop and it’s going to stay one. Email gets answered by the people who wrote the software, not a queue — including in June, which is when it matters.
Two things. Taking a photo needs bars — the completions, the notes and the clock all record with none. And the first time anybody opens a lake, the map imagery has to come down once over a connection. That’s the whole honest list, and you’d rather have it now than in June.
All seven reports export to CSV, and the completed-work report prints. Fifteen years of property history is yours, not ours, and there’s nothing in here built to make leaving hard.
Money
You don’t need invoice numbers, aging buckets or a QuickBooks sync to collect on a dock install. You need the job to close, the customer to see what was done, and a button to pay.
· 5 min read
Operations
On most working lakes the bars go at the first narrows and don’t come back until you round the point on the way home. Here’s what has to be true about a crew app before a crew will keep using one.
· 6 min read
Operations
A dock goes in Tuesday, the lift waits on the crane until Thursday, and the only thing connecting the two visits is somebody’s memory. It’s the most expensive unfixed problem in dock service.
· 6 min read
Half an hour. A few of your properties loaded, the pins dropped, a season run through it. If it’s not obviously better than what you’re doing now, that’s the answer you’ll get.