Marine service
The thing you are servicing does not stay put
A boat sits in a slip this month, gets trailered next month, and is serviced at the owner’s dock after that. Most field software assumes the thing you service is an address — so the moment the boat moves, the history splits in two and nobody can find last season’s work.
The serviced thing is not the place
Equipment is a first-class record that belongs to an owner and sits at a location — not a line in an address book. The hull, the engine, the generator, the electronics: each with its own history, its own dataplate photograph and its own service record, wherever it happened to be when you worked on it.
- Move the boat and the history moves with the boat, not with the slip.
- The dataplate photograph is on the equipment, so the serial and the model are readable from the truck rather than from a memory of last season.
- A location can contain other locations — a marina, its docks, a slip — so a yard is representable honestly instead of as a hundred unrelated addresses.
- Custom fields belong to the record they describe. Hull length, draft, engine hours, last bottom paint — in real typed columns you can sort and total.
What is actually installed, with its own history.
The dataplate, photographed once, readable forever.
Seasonal work is recurring work
Haul-out, winterisation, spring commissioning, bottom paint. A cadence with a window rather than a date — the same machinery a plumbing shop uses for a quarterly PM and a courier uses for a twice-weekly run.
- The window is what makes a season survivable. Everybody wants hauling out in the same three weeks. The schedule needs to know which jobs can slide and by how much before you start moving them.
- The checklist is where the yard’s standard lives. Winterisation done the way your yard does it, by a seasonal hire in October who was not here in March.
- Findings become quotes. A tech finds a soft transom during a haul-out, the rule routes it to whoever prices work, and the evidence is already attached. Quote flow in build
Photos are the conversation
Marine customers are not standing there while you work. The record of what you found, what you did, and what it looked like before you touched it is the basis of the invoice conversation — and the difference between a call that takes two minutes and one that takes a fortnight.
- Photographs banded by year, against the boat rather than the berth.
- The metadata is read and the original hashed on the server, from the bytes the device produced — so “taken that day, at that place” is something you can stand behind.
- Files on your own storage if you want them there. Decades of yard photography is a real asset and it should sit in an account you control.
Everything anyone photographed, in one place.
Tarvin Marine is the shop this page is written for.