How to Manage a Boat Fleet: A Practical Guide

One record per boat, and an owner for every field

Everything starts with a single record per boat. While the information is split between a notebook at the helm, a group chat and a spreadsheet, nobody really knows where a boat stands, and every question costs a phone call. The record should hold what you need to make decisions, not everything anyone has ever known about the boat. The most important field is also the one most often wrong: engine hours. Decide who records them and when. On a hire fleet, the skipper or pontoon team logs them at every return; on a boat managed for an owner, the captain reads them weekly; on every job, the engineer notes them before starting work. In Captain Crews, an hours-reading step in a job checklist updates the hours recorded for that engine, and an existing fleet list imports from an Excel file, with a preview before anything is saved. The fields that matter:

• Identity: name, registration, hull number, MMSI and call sign where the boat has them
• Engines: each engine and the generator, with make, model, serial number, position (port, starboard) and hours
• Drive, propellers, tanks and capacities, so the right part gets ordered first time
• Today's status: available, reserved, under way, on land, work order, under maintenance or unavailable
• Owner or paying entity, and usual location (marina, berth, yard)
• Documents and safety equipment, each with its expiry date

Preventive maintenance: hours, dates and reusable checklists

Preventive maintenance runs on two triggers. The first is use: oil and filters, impellers and belts are due after a number of engine hours. The second is time: anodes, antifouling, the annual service and a rig check fall due by date, even if the boat has barely moved. Intervals come from the boat and engine manufacturers' manuals, which override any general guideline, and a boat that works hard is a reason to stick to them without stretching. In practice, each engine gets its next service threshold and the job due. Captain Crews shows an amber badge within 100 hours of the threshold and a red one once it is passed, with a notification at each stage; after the service you enter the next threshold. Date-based tasks become recurring work templates, weekly, monthly or yearly: the job is created on every boat listed, for the person you named, with its checklist attached. An example plan for a workboat, to adjust to the manuals of its own engines:

• Weekly: bilge pumps on automatic and manual, fluid levels, belts, batteries, visible leaks
• Monthly: generator run under load, seacocks worked through, navigation lights
• Yearly: full service, lift-out and antifouling, safety equipment check, rig inspection
• By engine hours: oil and filters, fuel filter, raw-water impeller, at the intervals in the engine manual

Deadlines: paperwork and safety equipment

Fleets rarely lose their documents; they let them expire. Insurance, registration, certificates and the inspections your operation requires all need their expiry date recorded and a reminder early enough to act on. Safety equipment works the same way with one extra difficulty: across a fleet it adds up to dozens of items spread over many boats. Captain Crews keeps a safety register per boat: one line per item, with its location on board, serial number, expiry date and a reminder you can set for the whole company or item by item. The Deadlines screen pulls documents, safety equipment and engine thresholds for the whole fleet into one list sorted by urgency, and it prints. The minimum to track:

• Fire extinguishers: service or replacement date, and where each one is fitted
• Life raft and its hydrostatic release: service date
• EPIRB: battery date and registration kept current
• Flares: expiry date
• First aid kit: expiry dates of the contents
• Documents: insurance, registration, and the certificates and surveys your operation requires

Cost per boat: file every invoice against a hull

A fleet-wide spending total tells you nothing you can act on. The useful figure is the cost of each boat by category: engine, hull, electrics, safety, fuel. That is what reveals the boat costing twice as much as its sisters, and what helps you decide between repairing, refitting and selling. The rule is easy to state and hard to keep: every invoice is filed against a boat on the day it arrives. Invoice reading (OCR) in Captain Crews pulls out the supplier, invoice number, date, net amount, VAT and total, and a person checks and approves it. Each boat's Invoices tab totals the period you choose, with a filter by maintenance category, and the Fuel tab tracks litres and price paid. Divide that total by the year's engine hours or days in use and you get a cost per hour or per day that compares fairly from one boat to the next.

Crew: time, overtime and pay data

Crew is often a fleet's biggest running cost and the hardest to track accurately. Two questions matter: who worked on which boat, and for how many hours. Clocking in on a phone when work starts and stops beats a timesheet filled in from memory at the end of the month. In Captain Crews each clock-in can record the phone's location (required or optional, person by person), and the on-a-boat status ties the time to the right unit. Hours beyond each person's scheduled week are calculated over the pay period, at the overtime rate you set for that person; when the period is closed, the office decides what is paid and what is carried over. Leave, travel allowances (by zone or per kilometre) and cruise days paid at a day rate feed into the same summary. Captain Crews prepares pay summaries and exports; your accountant or payroll bureau runs the payroll itself and issues the statutory documents.

A routine that sticks: daily, weekly, seasonal

A method only works once it becomes a habit. Here is a basic routine to share between the office, the pontoon and the workshop. It takes a few minutes a day when information is entered as it happens, and far longer when a whole week is caught up on a Friday night.

• Every morning: status of each boat, today's jobs and who is on them, outings and bookings due
• Every evening: engine hours logged on return, problems reported, finished jobs closed out
• Every week: the Deadlines screen, services to book in, invoices to file, crew hours
• Every month: cost per boat, a statement for each owner, pay period closed
• Every season: a review per boat (use, costs, breakdowns), the laying-up or recommissioning plan, next year's budget

Six numbers to check every Monday

A dashboard is only worth something if someone looks at it. Six figures are enough to tell whether the fleet is in good shape. In Captain Crews each one is read on the screen that produces it: there is no single dashboard to build, just six places to check at the start of the week.

• Boats out of service today, and for how long: the fleet list and its statuses
• Services due within 100 engine hours: the engine record and the Deadlines screen
• Documents and safety items expiring this month: the Deadlines screen
• Late or blocked jobs: the workshop view, with urgent jobs and the reason a job is blocked
• This month's cost per boat: each unit's Invoices tab, filtered on the period
• Crew hours and overtime: the time history and its Excel export

Five traps to avoid

They turn up in almost every fleet that grows, whatever tool it uses. None of them costs money to fix: just a written rule and someone who makes sure it is followed.

• Letting everyone edit everything: every piece of information needs one person responsible for it
• Logging engine hours whenever someone remembers: a service alert is only as good as the hour meter reading
• Dropping invoices into a shared folder without filing them against a boat
• Running the schedule in a group chat, where changes get lost
• Picking a tool the pontoon team never opens: software used by one person changes nothing

Where Captain Crews fits

Captain Crews brings these five pillars into one tool: the record for each boat and its engines, jobs and reusable checklists, engine-hour thresholds, the safety register and the Deadlines screen, invoices read automatically and filed against the boat, fuel, time tracking and pay summaries. Company vehicles can join the same fleet. User roles decide who sees and who changes what, right down to boat owners, who only ever see their own boats.