Most boat records are a shoebox. Receipts from the yard, a text thread with a diver, a photo of a serial number taken in a hurry on a dark morning. All of it real, none of it in one place, and none of it in an order anyone can read.
The date is the part people skip
Ask an owner when the impeller was last changed and you usually get a season, not a date. That is not carelessness. Nobody writes down the day a small job happened, because on the day it happens it is small. It stops being small the next time somebody has to decide whether to do it again.
A line with a date on it answers that in a second. A line without one starts an argument, and the person you are arguing with is usually yourself, eleven months later.
What to write down
- The date the work happened, not the date you paid for it.
- Who did it, by name and company, and how to reach them again.
- What was replaced, with the part number if you have it.
- Engine hours at the time, if it was engine work.
- One photo. It costs nothing and settles most questions later.
That is the whole list. A record that captures those five things for every job is more useful than a binder of invoices, because an invoice is a document about money and this is a document about the boat.
Who writes it matters
A note you make yourself beats no note at all. A note made by the person who did the work beats yours, because they are the only one who was standing there.
That is why KEEL asks the pro to close the job out in the app rather than asking you to transcribe an invoice a week later. The washer confirms the wash. The diver logs the dive. The tech writes the estimate. You end up with a dated line and a photo, and you did not type any of it.
The record you can hand to somebody else is the only kind that survives you owning the boat.
What a record is not
A record does not render a verdict. It says what was done, when, and by whom. That distinction sounds pedantic right up until you are the one reading somebody else's record, and what you want from it is the raw fact rather than their opinion of the fact.
It is also the line KEEL draws about itself. A KEEL Score describes how complete and how current the documentation is. It does not assess the vessel, and it is not a survey. Our published methodology says exactly that, and this post says it too, because the place to be clear about what a number means is next to the number.
