Boat Storage Calculator
By the FootYour rate card, your boats, this month's bill.
Billing by the foot is simple arithmetic done sixty times, and it is done on the first of every month by somebody who would rather be doing anything else. One mistyped length is an invoice a customer rings about.
Marinas bill by the foot at a different rate for a wet slip, a dry stack and a boat on the hard, with a minimum for the small ones and a surcharge for anybody living aboard. Every yard's rate card is its own invention, which is why the first of the month is still a spreadsheet.
About this tool
Boat Storage Calculator: what it solves
A marina's rate card is not a price, it is a small system: a rate per foot that differs by whether the boat is in the water, in the stack or on the hard, a minimum below which a bill is not worth sending, and whatever flat lines the yard adds on top for living aboard or for power. The Boat Storage Calculator takes that card and the boat list and produces the month, line by line, showing which boats landed on their minimum rather than on their footage — because that is the line a customer queries. Lengths are held in half-feet and money in whole cents, so sixty slips do not drift. A boat entered under a kind that is not on the card is reported and left unpriced rather than quietly billed at something plausible, because a made-up figure on an invoice is worse than a blank one. It suggests no rate and no minimum: that card is the yard's own.
A rate card is not a price, it is a small system
Rate per foot, which differs by whether the boat is wet, in the stack or on the hard. A minimum below which the bill is not worth the paper. Flat lines on top for liveaboard, for power, for whatever this yard has decided to charge separately.
That is four things interacting, per boat, sixty or a hundred times a month. Every one of them is a multiplication anybody can do and nobody wants to do a hundred times on the first working day of the month.
The minimum is the line customers query
A twenty-two foot boat on a rate per foot lands under the minimum. So it gets billed at the minimum — which is correct, and which looks like a mistake to the person paying it, because the number does not match their boat times the rate they were quoted.
This shows which boats landed on the minimum rather than on their footage, as a separate thing you can see before the invoices go out. When the call comes you already know the answer, and you can tell them in one sentence instead of going back to the card.
That is a small feature and it is the one that saves the most time, because the queried line costs more to handle than the ten quiet ones either side of it.
A boat under a kind that is not on the card stays unpriced
Somebody types a storage kind that does not exist on the rate card. A typo, a new arrangement, a category the yard uses in conversation but never put on paper.
This reports the line and leaves it blank. It does not pick the nearest kind, does not fall back to the wet rate, and does not quietly bill something plausible.
A made-up figure on an invoice is worse than a missing one. A blank gets noticed and fixed in the office. A plausible wrong number gets sent, gets paid, and gets found in eight months by a customer who now trusts nothing else on the bill either.
Half-feet and whole cents
Lengths are held in half-feet and money in whole cents from the first line to the last, so a hundred slips do not drift a fraction at a time into a total that is close to right.
On one boat this does not matter. On a hundred boats over twelve months it is the difference between a figure you can hand to an accountant and one you have to apologize for.
What it replaces
The spreadsheet that runs the month, built by whoever ran the office before, with the rates typed into cells and one formula that nobody dares touch. It works. It also breaks silently the first time somebody inserts a row, and it holds the yard’s whole rate structure in a form only one person understands.
You enter your card once — rates by kind, the minimum, the flat lines. The boat list is a paste. The month is a read.
Who it is for
Marinas, boatyards and dry stacks — anywhere storage is billed off a card the yard wrote, against a list of boats that changes every month.
What it will not do
It suggests no rate and no minimum. What a foot is worth at your yard depends on your water, your depth, your town and what the yard down the creek charges — none of which a page knows, and all of which you do.
It does not know your slip assignments or your availability. This prices the list you give it. It is a billing sheet, not a yard management system, and it does not want to become one.
It will not price a boat it cannot price. See above. The blank is deliberate.
Nothing you type is sent anywhere. The arithmetic runs in your browser. Your rate card and your customer list are two of the more commercially sensitive things a yard has, and neither leaves the machine you are sitting at. Close the tab and it is gone.
Yours would be built the same way.
This one runs on made-up data. The version built for your business runs on yours, and you own it outright. Builds start at $1,300. That is a floor, not a quote. What yours costs is agreed before any work begins. The first conversation is free.