Bookkeeping for Marinas & Boatyards
A marina is five businesses sharing one dock: slip rental, a fuel station, a storage lot, a repair yard, and a store that sells $9 koozies. Your books usually treat it as one soggy number, which is how a good season still ends with a cash-flow mystery.
Five revenue streams, five ways to get it wrong
Annual slip contracts, transient dockage, fuel, dry storage, haul-outs and yard labor, and the ship's store all behave completely differently on the books — and blending them turns your P&L into a fog. The one that trips up almost every marina is the annual slip: a boater pays for twelve months in January, and if you book it all as January revenue, you'll think you had a spectacular winter followed by a suspiciously bad spring.
Recognized properly, that money spreads across the year it actually covers, and your monthly numbers finally reflect the marina instead of the billing calendar. Same story with prepaid storage. It's not exciting, but neither is explaining to a lender why your revenue looks like a heart monitor.
The fuel dock and the yard need real cost tracking
Fuel is high-volume, thin-margin, and inventory-heavy — you can move a fortune in diesel and keep almost none of it, so the margin has to be measured, not assumed. Clean books track fuel as inventory with real cost of goods, so you know what the dock actually earns versus what it merely handles.
The yard is the opposite problem: haul-outs, bottom jobs, and repairs are job-costed work, with labor and parts that belong to specific jobs. Without that, the yard's profitability is a shrug. We split it out so you can see which parts of the operation carry the marina and which just keep the docks looking busy.
How Kaizen runs it
We run your books on QuickBooks Online with a marina-shaped chart of accounts, recognize slip and storage revenue across the contract, track fuel as inventory, and job-cost the yard. Sales tax across dockage, fuel, and retail gets handled, and a documented monthly close lands the same reports on the same date every month.
We're named after kaizen — continuous improvement — so each close tightens the categories a little more. The goal is boring, dependable numbers you can dock a decision to.
What's included
- Slip and storage revenue recognized across the contract, not dumped in the month you billed
- Fuel tracked as inventory with real cost of goods and margin
- Yard work job-costed — haul-outs, bottom jobs, repairs, labor and parts
- Ship's-store retail and inventory kept separate from services
- Transient vs. annual dockage tracked distinctly
- Sales and fuel tax handled across dockage, fuel, and retail
- Bank and credit-card reconciliations every month
- 1099 tracking plus a monthly data-quality scan before errors compound
Pricing
Straight answers
How do you handle annual slip and storage contracts?
As deferred revenue — recognized across the months the contract covers, not the day it's paid. That's the only way your monthly revenue reflects the marina instead of your renewal calendar.
Can you track the fuel dock and the yard separately?
Yes — fuel as inventory with real margin, and the yard as job-costed work with labor and parts. Blended together they hide each other; split out, you can finally see what each one earns.
Our books are behind and the last bookkeeper didn't know boats from buoys.
Common, and a normal starting point. Month 1 of the Reset is the catch-up: reconcile, fix the revenue recognition, and land a first real close. Marine-specific setup is the part most general bookkeepers skip.
We're a small marina with a few dozen slips. Do we need this?
Maybe not yet. A simple operation with mostly slip income and a good bookkeeper can be fine. This earns its keep once fuel, a yard, and storage turn one business into five sharing a dock.
Related
Free 20-minute books assessment
We'll show you the five things we'd fix first in your books — useful whether you hire us, hire someone, or do neither.
Talk to SalesOr call us directly: +1 786 789 0969