The Dive Day on One Screen: Gurita Adds Boat Dispatch and Staff Shift Planning
Walk into almost any dive operation at seven in the morning and you will find the same two things hanging near reception: a whiteboard with today's boats, guides and guests scribbled on it, and a printed staff plan that stopped being true the moment someone called in sick. Gurita, our property-management system for dive resorts, liveaboards and dive centres, has just replaced both.
A dispatch board instead of a whiteboard
The new Boat dispatch board shows the whole dive day on one timeline: each boat gets its own lane, and every trip is a block with its departure time, dive site, and a fill bar that measures the load against what the boat actually holds. Moving a trip is a drag; extending one is a pull at its edge. When plans change at 7:40 — and they always do — the board changes with them, and everyone looking at it sees the same day.
Behind every trip sits a proper manifest. Open it and you see the lead guide and crew, every diver with their tank size and gas mix, who rented gear and who brought their own, and a running count of who has checked in and who is already on board. The compressor crew can read off how many nitrox tanks to fill, the office can see three open spots and sell them, and no boat leaves before the count on the screen says everyone is where they should be. For the captain's clipboard, the manifest prints as a PDF.
The quiet highlight comes at the end of the day. When the boat is back, one tap on Complete trip turns the plan into reality: Gurita writes the dive logs for every dive and every group — guides, tanks, gas, rental gear, all carried over. The dives appear on the guests' accounts, in their package counts and in your dive statistics, and nobody spends the evening typing the day into the system a second time.
Who works when — off the spreadsheet
The second new module, the Shift Plan, does for your people what the dispatch board does for your boats. Departments — dive guides, boat crew, housekeeping, reception, kitchen, maintenance — get their own colors on a weekly roster, every shift is a chip on the grid, and a counter per day shows how many people are actually on, so an understaffed day shows up a week ahead instead of the morning of.
Scheduling is direct: preset shift types like Early and Day, custom times, split shifts, and a recurring mode that lays down a whole month of fixed schedules in one go. Time off is part of the same picture — holidays, sick days and unpaid leave, down to half days, with each employee's annual holiday allowance tracked automatically. And when a day has been worked, a manager confirms it and the hours become work-log entries — ready for payroll. A report tab totals hours by department and employee, including labor cost for those allowed to see it.
Built as one system
Because both modules live in the same product, they know about each other: the roster marks the days someone is out on a dive trip, and the dispatch board only offers guides and crew who are actually on shift when the boat leaves. Plan the week once, and the dive day draws from it — no whiteboard, no spreadsheet, no 7 a.m. surprises.
Both modules are rolling out with Gurita 2.5 now. The Gurita team publishes an update every two weeks on the Gurita blog, and you can explore the product at gurita.app.
Curious what this would look like for your operation? Talk to us — we answer every inquiry within 24 hours on business days.