Marine Businesses · South Florida

The Yard Is Full. So Why Is the Bank Account Empty?

Bookkeeping, controller, and fractional CFO work for boatyards, marinas, yacht management, and charter operators. Built on the same mechanics, work in process, customer deposits, owner trust accounts, that we have cleaned up for years in construction, property management, and real estate.

The Money Problems Boats Create

Marine accounting is not exotic. It is four old disciplines wearing deck shoes. These are the spots where the books usually break.

REFITS THAT SPAN MONTHS, P&L THAT LIES

Half-finished jobs make your P&L swing from hero to disaster. Without a work-in-process schedule, you cannot tell a profitable month from a busy one.

CUSTOMER DEPOSITS BOOKED AS REVENUE

Deposits and prepaid slip fees are money you owe, not money you earned. Booked as income, they overstate profit and set up a tax bill on cash you cannot keep.

OWNER MONEY MIXED WITH YOURS

Yacht management runs on other people's money. If owner funds and operating cash share one account, every owner statement is a guess.

WARRANTY AND PARTS MARGIN IN THE DARK

Manufacturer warranty receivables age out. Parts markup never gets checked against cost. Margin leaks one work order at a time.

SEASON CONCENTRATION NOBODY PLANS FOR

Show season and storage season concentrate your whole year into a few months. Without a cash forecast, the slow months arrive as a surprise every single year.

CREW AND TRADES MISCLASSIFIED

Day-rate captains, fiberglass subs, seasonal crew. The 1099-versus-W-2 call follows the same framework as construction trades, and getting it wrong is expensive.

A Decade Inside These Exact Mechanics

Every problem on this page is one we have spent ten years fixing. Work-in-process schedules for jobs that run longer than the month. Customer deposits held as liabilities until the work delivers. Other people's money kept separate from operating cash, reconciled three ways, reported to owners cleanly.

That decade ran through construction, property management, hospitality, and real estate, the four disciplines marine accounting is built from. A refit is a job-costing problem. A slip is rent. A charter deposit is a hotel deposit. The collateral floats. The accounting does not change.

Founder-led and CPA-delivered: the person reading your work orders is the person who signed this page, not a rotating junior bookkeeper. Fixed prices, quoted before we start.

We do not sell familiarity with your docks. We sell books that survive a lender, a buyer, and a season.

Services & Pricing

MONTHLY BOOKKEEPING (From $699/mo)

Clean, current books with the marine mechanics handled right: deposits as liabilities, WIP tracked by work order, owner funds separated.

  • Monthly close and bank reconciliation
  • Customer deposits and prepaid slips as liabilities, not revenue
  • Work-order level job costing
  • P&L and balance sheet you can trust
  • Year-end package ready for your tax accountant

CONTROLLER / FRACTIONAL CFO (From $3,500/mo)

Controller-level eyes every month: WIP schedule, per-vessel or per-department P&L, cash forecast built around your season.

  • Monthly WIP schedule and margin review
  • Departmental P&L (service, parts, slips, fuel)
  • Seasonal cash flow forecast
  • Owner reporting packages for managed vessels
  • On call for pricing and expansion decisions

BOOKS CLEANUP (From $2,500)

Behind, blended, or booked wrong. We rebuild the file, separate the deposits and owner money, and hand back books a lender or buyer can read.

  • Historical cleanup and full reconciliation
  • Deposit and trust account untangling
  • QuickBooks rebuild or reorganization
  • Fixed price quoted before we start

We Wrote Down the Answers

Frequently asked questions

What types of marine businesses do you work with?

Boatyards and repair shops, marinas, yacht management companies, charter operators, brokerages, and boat dealers. The sweet spot is founder-led operations in the $1M to $5M range in South Florida, but if your books are the problem, the conversation is free either way.

Can you work with DockMaster or our marine software?

Yes. We treat DockMaster and similar systems the way we treat any job-cost or point-of-sale system: as the operational source that feeds the books. The accounting layer usually lives in QuickBooks Online, and the monthly discipline is reconciling the two so the P&L matches what the yard actually did.

Our books are months or years behind. Can you fix that?

That is what the cleanup engagement exists for. We have caught up 18 months of books in about two weeks. We scope from your actual file, quote a fixed price starting at $2,500, and tell you the timeline before anything starts.

Have you worked with marine businesses before?

Not marine specifically. Ten years of cleanup and bookkeeping in the industries marine accounting is made of: construction job costing for repair and refit work, property management trust accounting for yacht management, hospitality deposits for charter, and real estate escrow reconciliation for brokerage. The mechanics translate one to one. WIP is WIP, and job costing is job costing.

Do we have to replace our office manager or bookkeeper?

Usually not. If the day-to-day entry is solid, we sit above it as the controller layer: reviewing, reconciling, and telling you what the numbers mean each month. If the bookkeeping itself is the problem, we take it over and your office manager gets their week back.

Why does it matter if deposits are booked as revenue?

Because a deposit is a debt until you deliver the work. Booking it as income overstates profit, can trigger tax on money you may have to refund, and makes the business look better than it is right up until the season turns. Buyers and lenders check for this first.

Are you local? Do you come to the yard?

We are in Fort Lauderdale. The monthly work runs remotely, which keeps the price down, but we meet in person for initial consultations across Broward County, and being local matters in a market where the whole year concentrates around show season and storage season.

How much does this cost for a marine business?

Monthly bookkeeping starts at $699 a month. Controller and fractional CFO work starts at $3,500 a month. A one-time cleanup starts at $2,500, quoted fixed after we see the file. The rate card is public on purpose.

Do you do taxes?

No, and that is intentional. We do the bookkeeping, controller, and CFO work that makes the numbers trustworthy, then hand your tax accountant a clean file. Legal and regulatory specifics, like escrow rules for your license, stay with your attorney; we run the bookkeeping discipline underneath them.

KLYVNT Advisors provides bookkeeping, controller, and fractional CFO services for founder-led businesses in South Florida. Book a call.