Job Management Software for Boat Builders

That is fine. Keep adding the real hours, purchases and changes as the build moves along.

Each build can carry its own parts, stages and costs.

Keep their costs with the same job as your own labour and purchases.

Keep the change with the job so it does not disappear by the time you invoice.

No, but it changes what you watch. A build that runs nine months accumulates cost continuously against an estimate set before anything started, so the useful signal is the trend rather than the final number. Labour, purchases, subcontract work and materials record against the project throughout. The value of seeing a drift at month three is that something can still be done about it; at month nine you are only learning what to quote next time.

Yes. Each build is its own project with its own stages, purchases and labour. Where structure repeats — hull, fit-out, systems, commissioning — a template gives you a starting shape without constraining the individual build. Custom boat building is one of the harder things to cost precisely, and the honest benefit is not prediction but accumulation: after a handful of builds you have real numbers for stages you previously guessed at.

Yes. Subcontract costs are purchases raised against the project, so electrical, upholstery, rigging, engineering and specialist trades all land on the same job as your own labour. On a boat where subcontract content can rival internal labour, this is usually the difference between knowing the build’s real position and knowing only your own hours. There is a scheduling dimension as well. Specialist marine subcontractors are frequently booked weeks ahead and work across several yards, so a slip in your build does not simply move their work — it can lose the slot entirely. Keeping their engagement attached to the project, rather than in someone’s calendar, is what makes that dependency visible before it becomes a three-week hole in the programme.

Record the change on the build as it happens, with the original allowance still visible. Customer changes are constant in boat building, and they arrive conversationally — a call, a visit, a decision made standing on the deck. Capturing them at that moment is what makes them invoiceable. The most expensive habit in the trade is agreeing to a change on a Tuesday and trying to reconstruct it nine months later.

Yes, by structuring the project into tasks for each stage and recording labour against them. Stage-level data is what eventually makes your estimating credible: you stop quoting a whole build from an overall figure and start quoting it from the actual hours that hull, fit-out and commissioning have taken on comparable boats. It also gives you a much earlier warning. A build that is twenty per cent over on hull hours is not going to recover it in fit-out, whatever anyone hopes, and knowing that at the end of the first stage is worth considerably more than knowing the total at handover. For yards that build a recognisable range rather than pure one-offs, a few completed boats’ worth of stage data is usually enough to make the next quote defensible rather than instinctive.

Purchase them against the build so the cost and the timing sit with the job. Engines, generators, electronics and specialist hardware often have to be ordered before the hull is finished, and having them attached to the project keeps both the money and the delivery date visible against the build they belong to rather than in a separate procurement list. The timing is usually the more dangerous of the two. A build programme that assumes a sixteen-week engine delivery and gets twenty-four does not fail at the engine — it fails three stages later, when everything downstream has been planned around a date that was never going to hold. Keeping the order on the project means the dependency is attached to the work it affects rather than living in a supplier email.

Yes, as project documents. On a build running the better part of a year, with a specification that develops as it goes, having the current document set attached to the job is a practical necessity rather than a filing preference. The risk on a long build is not losing documents, it is working from superseded ones — a shipwright building to a general arrangement that was revised two months ago produces work that has to be undone, and that cost lands on you rather than on whoever issued the revision. Keeping the current set with the job is the cheapest defence against that. It also matters at handover, when the owner wants the complete record and assembling it from four people’s inboxes is a week nobody priced.

Progress invoicing is supported, which suits boat building because payment is normally staged against build milestones. The job stays open and accumulating while claims are raised against it, so what you have invoiced and what you have spent stay comparable. That comparison is the one that matters on a long build. A yard can be profitable on paper and still run out of cash halfway through a boat, because the milestones were set where they were easy to agree rather than where the money is actually spent — and the heavy spending on a custom build is usually earlier than the milestone schedule assumes. Seeing invoiced against incurred, stage by stage, is what turns that from a year-end discovery into something you can raise before signing the next contract.

Yes, if you give them their own tasks. Commissioning is where boat builds most commonly overrun, because the work is diagnostic rather than planned and it happens when everyone has stopped watching the budget. Costing it separately is how you find out whether your commissioning allowance has ever been right. The honest answer for most yards is that it has not been, because commissioning is quoted as a percentage or a round number rather than derived from anything. It is also the stage most exposed to other people’s problems: a fault in a bought-in system becomes your hours while the supplier works out whose fault it is. Recording those hours against the build is what eventually tells you which suppliers are genuinely cheaper and which only look it.

No. It runs the build and connects to accounting for the financial side. The change worth having is that a nine-month build stops being a single large number you reconcile at the end and becomes something with visible structure while it is still in the shed. On a long custom build the accounting view is close to useless as a management tool — work in progress moves, deposits and progress claims distort the timing, and the month in which a boat is delivered looks spectacular for reasons that have nothing to do with how the build went. Stage-level job cost is the only view that tells you, while the boat is still yours to influence, whether this one is going the way the last one did.