Your laptop dies on the last day of a charter. On it lives the only copy of the APA spreadsheet, six weeks of interior accounts, and a folder of photographed receipts. The guest wants their statement in an hour. Nobody will care how good your bookkeeping was; they will only see that the yacht cannot account for EUR 60,000 of someone else's money.
Spreadsheets vs Yacht Accounting Software
| Spreadsheet | Dedicated yacht accounting / purchasing software | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Effectively free | Licence fee |
| Cost codes | Manual, easily broken | Enforced by the system |
| Audit trail | Weak — cells can be silently overwritten | Strong — entries are logged and versioned |
| Receipt capture | Separate folder, easily lost | Attached to the transaction |
| Reporting | Rebuilt by hand each month | Generated |
| Handover | Only as good as the file naming | The system is the handover |
A spreadsheet can be run professionally if it is disciplined, versioned, backed up and locked. Most of the time, it is not.
Digital Receipts
- Photograph every receipt the day you receive it. Thermal paper fades to blank within weeks.
- Name the file consistently:
YYYY-MM-DD_Vendor_Amount_Code. - Attach the image to the transaction, not to a random camera roll.
- Keep the paper original too, filed by month, until the management company confirms it is no longer needed.
Backups
Follow 3-2-1: three copies of the data, on two different media, with one copy off the yacht (an approved cloud account, not a personal one). Test that the backup actually restores — an untested backup is a rumour, not a control.
Handover
The handover pack, signed by both parties, contains:
- The current float, counted with a witness, and the signed float handover sheet.
- Reconciled accounts to the handover date, with all open items listed.
- Receipts, digital and paper, filed and complete.
- Supplier contacts, price lists, standing orders, account numbers.
- Passwords transferred through the yacht's proper channel, never by message and never verbally in a bar.
Guest Financial Data and Data Care
Guest data is often personal data and, where GDPR or similar regimes apply, it is protected. In practice:
- Never store guest card numbers, and never photograph a card. Redact any card digits appearing on a receipt.
- Collect the minimum you need, keep it only as long as required, and share it only with those who must have it.
- Do not put guest names, preferences or spend into personal cloud accounts, personal phones or messaging groups.
- Never discuss what a guest spends. It is not a story; it is confidential financial information.
The Professional Line
You are the custodian of someone else's money. Not its owner, not its beneficiary, not its judge. The whole of this course reduces to that sentence, and to the habits that prove it: record it, code it, evidence it, report it, hand it over clean.
Onboard Notes
- A backup on the same laptop is not a backup.
- If you lose data, say so immediately. Concealment turns an IT failure into an integrity failure.
- xplor is not an accredited GUEST provider. Nothing here awards or counts toward a unit, certificate or Certificate of Competency.