Setting Up Suprata for a Marina

If you're running a marina, Suprata's reservations subsystem was largely designed for you. Slips, dry storage, mooring balls, transients, seasonals, dockage billing, electric metering, audit walks, dockmaster operations — they all live here. This guide walks you through a clean, multi-week setup.

It's long because there's no shortcut. A marina has more moving parts than almost any business Suprata serves. The good news: once you're set up, day-to-day operation is fast.

Before you start

You need three things in hand before you sit down at the keyboard:

1. A list of every bookable thing at the marina. Slips by size and amenity, dry storage spaces, mooring balls. Don't fudge this — you'll be entering each as an asset, and missing one means it can't be booked or billed.
2. An aerial image of the property. A clean, top-down photo or a CAD plan that shows every dock and slip. You'll upload this and pin assets onto it. Drone photos work great. Google Earth screenshots can work in a pinch.
3. Your seasonal pricing. Annual rates, summer-only rates, transient day rates, monthly rates. Each will become a package.

Plan on a multi-week setup. A small marina (40 slips) can be live in a week of evenings. A large one (300+ slips, multiple docks, dry storage, indoor storage) is a 3–6 week project even with focus.

Week 1 — Foundation

Day 1: Run the setup wizard

The reservations setup wizard is your starting point. It walks you through the high-level scaffolding: confirming you want the reservations subsystem on, naming what you call your bookable units (slips? sites? units?), defining your fundamental reservation types (overnight, monthly, seasonal, annual), and seeding default packages.

You can re-run it later if needed, but get it through once before you start customizing — many configuration screens look intimidating without the wizard's defaults in place.

Day 2: Asset types

Before you create individual slips, define asset types. An asset type is a category of bookable thing — "30-amp wet slip", "50-amp wet slip up to 40ft", "dry storage space (covered)", "mooring ball, deepwater". Asset types are how the system knows:

• What default rate to apply.
• Which required documents are needed (different documents for liveaboards vs. transients).
• Which packages are valid for this kind of asset.
• What metering applies (does it have an electric meter? a water meter?).

For a typical marina, you might have:

• Wet Slip — 30-amp, up to 30ft
• Wet Slip — 30-amp, up to 40ft
• Wet Slip — 50-amp, up to 50ft
• Wet Slip — 50-amp, 50ft+
• Wet Slip — 100-amp, megayacht
• Dry Storage — Outdoor
• Dry Storage — Indoor / Covered
• Mooring Ball

Don't over-fragment. If you have ten slips that are all "30-amp, 30ft", they're one asset type with ten assets — not ten asset types.

Day 3-4: The property map

Upload your aerial image as a map. Then draw zones for each dock or area — "A Dock", "B Dock", "Dry Storage North", "Mooring Field". Zones are how customers and staff visually navigate the marina.

Once zones are drawn, place each asset onto the map. Click on the map at the slip's location, link the placement to a specific asset. This is tedious but it's a one-time job. Power through it in a focused afternoon.

The map matters because it's what shows up to customers in the booking flow ("pick a slip on the map"), to dockmasters (visualizing who's where), and on the audit walk (the walk follows the map zone-by-zone).

Day 5: Individual assets

Now create each individual slip, dry storage space, and mooring ball as an asset. Each asset gets:

• A name or number ("A-12", "Slip 47", "Mooring 3").
• Its asset type (see day 2).
• A length, beam, depth (so you can match boats to slips).
• An electric service spec (30-amp, 50-amp, 100-amp, etc.).
• A water/sewer connection flag.
• The map placement.

If you have a hundred slips, this is the biggest data-entry day of the project. Don't try to do it from a phone. Get a CSV template if you have a lot to enter, or have an admin do it over a couple of days.

Week 2 — Pricing and packages

Day 6-7: Reservation types and packages

A reservation type is a category of stay: transient (per-night), monthly, seasonal (multi-month, fixed window), annual. A package is a priced bundle for a specific reservation type and asset type combination.

Real-world example combinations:

Set up a package per real combination. Add-ons within a package handle electric/water/pumpout fees. Items in a package handle one-time charges like setup or cleanout.

Day 8: Required documents per asset type

Marinas need paperwork. For each asset type, define which documents are required before a reservation can finalize:

• All slip rentals: insurance certificate (with marina listed as additional insured), state vessel registration, USCG documentation if applicable.
• Liveaboards (long-stay): pet documentation if applicable, additional insurance.
• Mooring balls: insurance, mooring tackle inspection.

The documents subsystem will hold each required document, expire it on the date you set, and prompt customers to upload renewals. Configure the required document types now so the booking flow can enforce them.

Week 3 — Operations

Day 9-10: Meters

If you bill electric (and you should if your slips have meters), set up the electric meter for each metered slip:

• Define each meter as an asset.
• Assign it to the slip it serves.
• Configure how it reports — most marinas use either standard polling (Suprata reaches out to the meter on a schedule) or webhook-based meter readings (the meter pushes readings to Suprata), depending on what your meter hardware supports.

Once meters are set up, readings populate automatically (Suprata polls hourly or daily depending on your meter setup). At settlement time, the difference between current and previous reading × your rate per kWh appears on the customer's invoice.

If your meters are mechanical (read manually), there's a manual-entry path — a dockmaster reads the meter and enters the value through the meter readings screen. This is fine for small marinas; automate when you outgrow it.

Day 11: Late fees

Configure late fees for moorage. Typical setup:

• Annual / seasonal: 5% per month overdue, capped at 25%.
• Monthly: $50 flat fee at 10 days past due, $100 at 30 days.
• Transient: less common — if they don't pay, they don't leave.

Late fees apply automatically once configured. Test the configuration in a sandbox account before going live; once fees apply, undoing them is manual.

Day 12: Audit walks

A daily or weekly audit walk is how you keep tabs on the marina — checking each slip is occupied as expected, no unauthorized boats, no overdue paperwork, no obvious damage. Configure the audit walk template:

• What questions to ask per slip ("Is the boat present?", "Insurance current?", "Power cord secured?").
• What zones to walk (A Dock, B Dock, Mooring Field).
• Who walks (dockmaster, dock attendant).

Once configured, the dockmaster opens the walk on a tablet and works through each asset systematically. Findings flag for follow-up (a missing insurance cert generates a renewal email; an unauthorized boat generates a notice).

Week 4 — Settlement and billing

Day 13-14: Long-stay billing schedules (folio)

For monthly and annual customers, the system runs a settlement routine that periodizes their stay into billing periods. Configure the settlement cadence:

• Monthly customers typically settle on the 1st of each month. Their previous month's electric usage gets calculated, slip rent for the new month is billed, late fees applied if applicable.
• Annual customers typically settle once a year on contract anniversary. Or quarterly if you collect electric quarterly.

Settlement is automated. Don't manually invoice long-stay customers — let the settlement engine do it. If you start hand-invoicing on top of settlements, you'll get duplicate charges.

Day 15: Deposits and compliance

Marinas commonly hold deposits for damage. Configure how much deposit applies per asset type, when it's collected (at booking? at check-in?), and what happens at settlement (held? applied? refunded?). The deposit compliance screen tracks which reservations have appropriate deposits and which don't.

Day 16: Test bookings end-to-end

Before going live, run real test bookings:

• A transient booking (one night, walks in, pays at the helm).
• A seasonal booking (May 1 – Oct 31, deposits, paperwork, settlement).
• An annual booking (full year, electric metered, late fees configured).

Walk each one through end to end: customer-facing email, deposit collection, document upload, daily audit walk presence, settlement at month-end, electric meter reading, late fee triggering. Whatever bothers you in the test will bother your customers later.

Day 17-21: Train your team

The dockmaster, dock attendants, and office staff each need different training:

• Dockmaster: audit walk, daily reservation list, walking the docks with the tablet, handling no-shows and walk-ins, taking transient payments at the helm.
• Dock attendants: assisting with arrivals, taking deposits, signing in transients via the booking app, basic audit-walk recording.
• Office staff: monthly settlement review, late fee management, document follow-up, deposit refunds, customer billing questions.

Plan an hour per role, walking them through the parts they'll use daily. Don't try to teach the whole system to anyone — they don't need it.

Going live

Live day is anticlimactic if the prep was thorough. Stop using your old system; start using Suprata. Watch closely for the first month — most issues surface in the first 30 days as edge cases hit (a weird package combo, a customer with two boats, a meter that's not polling).

If you're switching mid-season, you have two choices: cut over cleanly (everyone re-enters effective the cutover date) or import history (every active reservation gets entered into Suprata representing its current state). The first is simpler, the second preserves continuity. For most marinas, cutover at the start of a billing cycle is the path of least pain.

Common mistakes

Skipping the map. The map isn't decoration. The booking flow, the dockmaster's daily walk, the audit walk — all reference it. A marina without a map in the system is operating with one hand tied behind its back.

Setting up too few asset types. If every slip is just "Wet Slip", you can't price differently by amperage or length and you can't enforce different document requirements. Take the time to define the real categories.

Not metering electric. Marinas underprice electric on default packages because they assume average use, then end up subsidizing high-draw boats (megayachts, AC-running liveaboards). Metering pays for itself fast.

Letting documents expire silently. Suprata will automatically email customers about expiring insurance, but only if you configured the document types and required-document mappings. If you skipped that step, expiries pass silently and you're holding boats with lapsed insurance.

Manual-billing long-stay customers. The settlement engine exists for this. Doing it by hand creates duplicate charges, missed metering, and reconciliation nightmares.

Treating annual customers like transients. Annual customers are reservations with a long date range, billed via settlement cadence — they're not a service agreement, not a subscription, not a recurring invoice. See Subscriptions vs. service agreements vs. recurring invoices for why.

Not running the audit walk consistently. The walk catches problems early — uninsured boats, broken pedestals, the boat that didn't actually arrive. Skip a few weeks and you find out at month-end.

What you can defer

• Custom forms for slip-specific data (e.g., capturing boat measurements during arrival). The standard intake form covers most marinas; build customs only if you find a gap.
• Public waitlist for full marinas. Worth it eventually but not for week-one operations.
• Automation — auto-emails, auto-renewals. Wait until you've done renewals manually for a season; you'll automate the right things.
• Customer-facing booking widget. The internal booking flow handles all bookings staff make. The public widget for customers to book themselves comes later.

Related articles

• Is the reservations system right for you?
• Setting up asset types
• Building a package
• Uploading and configuring your property map
• Long-stay billing and settlements
• Setting up utility meters
• Audit walks: the monthly property inspection
• Setting up Suprata for a campground
• Setting up Suprata for a marine service company