Keeping her running.

Every maintenance app can hold a schedule. The schedule is not the hard part. The hard part is everything around it — the hours the intervals are counted from, the parts you need before you can start, the vendor who did it last time, and the record of what actually happened. Those are what turn a calendar into a maintained boat.

Schedules that start populated

Maintenance templates for the major brands — Volvo Penta, MAN, CAT, Cummins, Yanmar, Onan, Northern Lights, MerCruiser, Seakeeper, Side-Power and Lewmar — so service schedules begin with content instead of beginning blank. A blank schedule is a schedule nobody fills in.

Intervals run on hours or on dates, whichever the job actually follows, and marking one done pre-fills the next due date so the schedule rolls forward on its own. Urgency is computed live from that date rather than read from a status written the last time the row was saved — so “6 overdue · 14 due in 30 days” means the same thing on every screen that says it.

Hours, two ways, treated the same

Service intervals are only as good as the hour readings behind them.

• Manually, on a schedule you set — daily, weekly, per engine hour, per trip. The app prompts at the right moment; tap, confirm, done.
• Automatically, from your NMEA 2000 network. Engine hours accrue into the record on their own, rate-limited to at most one entry per engine every fifteen minutes — a bus that broadcasts twice a second would otherwise bury the history in thousands of near-zero rows.
• Live, from the same bus — depth, temperatures, voltages, tank levels and engine data on the display as they happen, with a reading saved into the record whenever one is worth keeping.

Hours Watch then does the arithmetic properly: intervals due and overdue, burn-rate anomalies, hour logs going stale, and hour meters that have started to disagree with each other.

Work orders

When a job is real, it becomes a work order — with a number, a scope of items, a vendor, and a closeout that keeps “is the fault gone” and “was the vendor’s work good” as two separate answers. That flow is the spine of the app and it has its own page.

Systems, not “the engines”

Work belongs to a unit. The port main, not “mains”. Genset 1, not “genset”. Every system carries its make, model, serial, install date and last documented service, and every job, document, spare and hour reading hangs off the specific unit it concerns. It is the difference between a history you can read and a pile you can search.

The parts you need to actually start

A job you cannot begin for want of an impeller is not really scheduled, so stowage is part of maintenance rather than a separate hobby.

A part moves needed → ordered → received → on hand, and only the last state carries a stowage location — because the other three genuinely do not have one yet. Most inventory systems demand a location the moment something arrives, which is how a shelf ends up lying to you.

Once it is on hand it lives in exactly one place, and moving it is logged. Locations are organised the way a boat is: Fore-Ship, Mid-Ship, Aft-Ship, with finer zones — bow, cockpit, salon, galley, master, guest, crew quarters, engine room, lazarette, fly bridge, swim platform — because a thirty-locker boat as one flat list is not a list anybody reads.

And a spare can be linked to the system it serves, so the raw-water impellers appear inside the tender’s own screen. You find the part where you were already standing, not by remembering what you called it.

Then it is plain-word search: spare impeller, flare kit, the good corkscrew. Crew and guests look things up without calling the captain, which is the actual measure of whether a stowage system works.

Or skip the search entirely

Print a QR label for a locker and stick it on the door. Scan it with the phone and you are looking at what is inside — no searching, no remembering what you called the locker, no knowing the app. Point at the door, read the contents. A guest can do it.

Fuel, logged

Fills go in with volume, price and location, against the tank they went into. That is what makes burn rate real rather than remembered — and it is the number that tells you an engine has started drinking before anything else does.

Vendors, and the work they actually did

A vendor is a card with contacts, work sessions and history — not a phone number in a note. Work is assigned to them, signed off against them, and stays attached to their card. So “who did the last impeller, and how did that go?” is a question with an answer rather than a memory. That history is also what the Insurance Export draws on.

Why the whole loop, and not just the schedule

Because a schedule tells you what to do and a record tells you what happened, and only one of those is worth anything eighteen months later. It is also, not incidentally, exactly the shape Foresight learns from — a job with a real outcome on the end of it is a complete sentence. A job that just stops is not.