A marina sells length. The rate card is a price per foot, and a pontoon of large berths earns very differently from a pontoon of small ones with the same number of cleats. Nearly every system behind it is priced on a different count: per berth, per member, per night or per entry. That gap between the unit you sell and the unit you are billed on is what makes the bill behave oddly as the marina changes shape.
It is not dishonest, and for a small harbour one subscription is usually the sensible way to run. It matters before the next round of pontoon work, because growth in feet and growth in berths are not the same thing.
The counts your stack is priced on
- The marina management system, charged per berth per month or in bands set by how many berths you hold.
- Transient dockage, charged on each night booked or as a share of the nightly rate.
- Membership and dues, charged per member record per year, counting family, social members and cadets alike.
- Race and tournament entry, charged on each entry, again for every race in a series and every day of a regatta.
- Yard, haul-out and storage, licensed per user or per lift booking and paid for through the months the yard is closed.
Write each line on one page with its count beside it.
Growth in feet and growth in berths
Rebuild a pontoon and replace a run of small berths with a shorter run of large ones, and you let more feet than before. The rate card earns more while the berth count has fallen, so a per-berth system quietly becomes better value and nobody notices.
Now do the opposite. A dinghy park or a row of small finger berths adds many berths and very little length, and per-berth pricing charges the same for each of them as for the deep-water end, so your cost per foot rises sharply at the cheapest part of the marina. Bands behave the same way: crossing into the next one can reprice every berth you already had.
Working the bill out per foot
Convert the bill into your own unit once a year.
- Add twelve months of every software charge from the page above, spreading annual licences across the year.
- Add anything taken as a share of dockage or entries before the money reaches you, which means reading the payout reports and not only the invoices.
- Total the feet of berthing you actually let over the year, rather than the feet you own.
- Divide the first figure by the second to get software cost per let foot per year, then put it beside your rate card. It is now in the same units as the price you charge.
Do it again next year, because the direction of travel matters more than the figure itself.
The months when the water is empty
Dues, licences and berth-roll subscriptions run for twelve months. The income does not. Much of the winter earning moves ashore into the yard, and the yard module is often licensed per user for a season of a few short weeks. Check what is charged in the quiet months for capacity nobody is using.
What we would leave alone
Card processing, the rating authority that certifies a handicap, and any returns a harbour authority requires through its own system all stay exactly where they are. Those are networks rather than features.
What sits around them is ordinary software: agreements priced by length, pro rata starts and renewals, the waiting list, the dockmaster's arrivals board and yard invoices. Put a year of your own charges into the software bill calculator, then read what marinas and boating events rent and what can be rebuilt; our guide to renting versus owning software covers the cases where staying put is right. Where it is not, we rebuild only the parts you use for one flat monthly price, at a target of about a tenth of the bill, and the new system runs beside the old one until it has proved itself.