You bill by the foot. Your software bills by the berth.
A marina sells length: so many feet of pontoon, by the month or by the season. The systems behind it are priced on berths, members, entries and nights, and not one of those is the unit your revenue is measured in.
What a marina or club usually rents
This stack was bought one problem at a time, the berth roll first and the race office last, and each piece is priced on a different count.
Billed per berth, earning per foot
Your rate card is a price per foot, so a pontoon of small berths and a pontoon of large ones earn very differently from the same number of cleats. Software priced per berth cannot see that difference. It charges the same for the dinghy park as for the deep-water end, and it charges right through the winter, when much of the water is empty and the income has moved ashore into the yard.
Dues and entry fees restart on a cycle, which is the property that matters. The same member is charged for again next year. The same boat pays an entry fee for each race in a series, then for the regatta, then for the autumn tournament. Add a winter series and you add a full season of per-entry charges, while the race office does the work it always did, staffed by the same volunteers as before.
Then there is the boat that exists in four places at once. The berth roll knows its length, the dues system knows its owner, the race office knows its certificate and the yard knows when it comes out of the water. Nothing joins them up, so the waiting list sits in a spreadsheet, the insurance expiry sits in somebody's inbox, and the three are reconciled by hand every spring.
What we rebuild for a marina or club
- Berth and mooring agreements priced by lengthYour rate card by the foot, with annual, seasonal and monthly terms, pro rata from a mid-season start, and renewals that go out with next year's rate already applied.
- The waiting list, running on your rulesPosition, the date each applicant joined, the length and draught they need, and every offer made, accepted or declined, so a list that takes years to move can still be explained to the person standing on it.
- Transient dockage and the dockmaster's dayNightly availability by length, beam and draught, tomorrow's arrivals and departures, and fuel and pumpout charged to the visit instead of written on a pad by the fuel dock.
- Haul-out, storage and yard workLift bookings against crane and cradle availability, hardstanding and shed space sold by the foot, launch dates, and yard charges landing on the same account as the berth.
- Entries, crew lists and declarationsOne entry per boat carrying its class, its rating certificate number and expiry date, the crew list and the declarations your sailing instructions require, ready for the race committee before the first gun.
What stays rented, and should
- Handicap and rating authoritiesA rating is issued and certified by the rating authority, and it is worth something only because every other boat on the start line is measured the same way. We hold the certificate number and its expiry on the boat's record and flag the ones that have lapsed.
- Card processingBerth fees, dues and entries all pass through your payment processor at the processor's rate, whichever system raises the charge.
- Harbour authority and statutory reportingWhere a harbour authority, coastguard or fisheries regulator requires returns through its own system, that remains the record they rely on. We prepare the figures in the shape it asks for.
The boat is the customer, not just the owner
Almost every record in a marina hangs off a vessel rather than a person. The berth is let to a length, the insurance certificate names a hull, the rating certificate belongs to a boat and the lift is booked against a weight. Owners change and the boat stays. Rented systems usually model the account first and treat the vessel as a field on it, which is why the insurance renewal, the registration document and the certificate expiry end up chased out of a mailbox rather than off a list.
Building it the other way round changes the daily work. Each vessel carries its own file: length overall and beam as measured, every document on record with its expiry, the berth it holds, its yard history and its entries. One owner can hold two boats. A boat can be sold mid-season with the agreement transferred instead of retyped. A new bowsprit that changes the overall length changes the invoice, because the length is what the invoice was built on.
Questions marinas and clubs ask
Can it charge by length overall rather than per berth?
Yes, and that is where we start. The rate card is per foot, with different rates by pontoon, by term and by season if that is how you sell. Multihulls charged on beam, tenders, and boats that overhang the berth they are in are handled as rules rather than as manual adjustments at invoice time.
Our waiting list takes years. Can it stay exactly as it is?
Yes. The list runs on your rules, including how a position is held, what happens when someone declines an offer, and whether time served counts towards seniority. Every offer and every response is recorded, which matters most on the day a member asks why the boat behind them was given a berth first.
Do we still use our handicap rating system for racing?
Yes. Ratings and certificates come from the rating authority and none of that changes. What we build is the entry itself: the boat, the class, the certificate number and expiry, the crew list and the declarations, so the race office is not retyping from emails on the morning of the first race.
We are a small club with a handful of moorings. Is this worth it?
Often not, and we would rather say so. If one modest subscription and a spreadsheet cover your season, stay where you are. Add up a full year first, including the berth system, the dues, the entry fees and anything taken as a share of dockage, with the calculator on this site. If the total is small, keep what you have.
From the blog, for marinas and boating events
- What a marina waiting list actually has to trackSeptember 30, 2026 · A berth list that takes years to move has to survive staff changes and answer one hard question: why was that boat offered a berth before mine?
- Marina software priced per berth when your rate card is per footSeptember 29, 2026 · Berth systems count berths, dues count members and entries count starts. How that behaves as a marina changes shape, and how to convert the bill into feet.
Keep reading
Send us what the berth roll and the race office cost
What you pay per berth, per member and per entry, and how much of the season it actually covers.
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