Starting a Yacht Group in Kai: The Essential First Steps
Co-owning a yacht is wonderful right up until the season starts and everyone wants the same August week. The sailing is the easy part. Keeping the calendar fair, the running costs clear, and the maintenance on schedule is what wears groups down. Kai is built to carry that for you, once it knows how your group works. You can be set up in an afternoon, and you only need a handful of things in place to get real value. Here they are, in the order we'd do them.
You can start for free. There's a 30-day grace period with no card required, so you can build everything below before deciding on a plan.
1. Create the group and choose how it's run
When you create a group, Kai asks how it's owned and paid for. Pick the model that matches reality: one owner who charters the yacht to others, or equal partners who share the ownership and the costs. This sets sensible defaults for cost sharing that you can adjust later, so it's worth getting roughly right now. Give the group a name, set your currency, and you're in.
2. Add the yacht and set its daily rate
Add your yacht as an asset. Start by choosing the vessel type, sailing yacht, motor yacht, or catamaran, because that decides which maintenance checklist Kai hands you (sailing yachts get rigging and sail jobs; motor yachts don't). Then add the registration or hull number, the length, and your home port.
If your group charges for use, set the daily rate here. If it doesn't, leave it blank (more on that in the next step). Either way, enter the current engine hours reading, because that's the number your service intervals count down from.
3. Decide how costs are shared
This is the biggest difference from an aircraft group, and it's worth agreeing with your co-owners before the season starts. Yacht groups tend to handle money one of two ways, and Kai supports both.
Pay by the day. Set a daily rate, and members are billed for the days they use, on top of their share of the fixed costs. This suits groups where some sail far more than others and want usage to pay its own way. It's the closest model to how an aircraft group runs.
Share the costs, refuel your own. Plenty of yacht groups don't charge for use at all. There's no daily rate. The fixed costs (mooring, insurance, the annual haul-out, maintenance) are split between owners by their ownership share, and whoever takes the yacht simply brings it back fuelled and covers their own fuel and any marina fees along the way. In Kai you leave the daily rate blank and let ownership shares do the splitting.
You can sit somewhere in between, too, such as no daily rate but a small per-day contribution to a shared maintenance fund, and you can change the arrangement as the group settles in.
Either way, Kai can log each trip's marina fees and tracks fuel and fresh water, so the group always sees what's being used. Engine hours are recorded for maintenance, not for billing.
4. Invite co-owners and set ownership shares
Invite the rest of the group by email. As each person joins, set their ownership share. Shares decide how the fixed costs (mooring, insurance, the annual haul-out) split, and they confirm who's entitled to book. Equal partners can split evenly, and uneven splits are fine too, as long as they add up to 100%.
5. Agree how the season is shared
The argument on a shared yacht is rarely about a random Tuesday. It's about the peak weeks: August, the school holidays, the warm long weekends. A few booking rules settle it before it starts. Set a maximum trip length so nobody takes the yacht for a fortnight, and add a fair-share quota or a cap on how many trips a member can hold at once. If peak season is the real prize, make sure every owner has an equal claim on it.
Turn on the waitlist while you're there, so when a wanted week is given up it passes to the next owner in line automatically, rather than to whoever happens to be watching the calendar. Admin sign-off is available if your group wants to approve every trip, but most groups don't need it.
6. Add the maintenance you can't miss
Kai comes with a ready-made checklist for your vessel type, so you're not starting from a blank page. Add the jobs that keep the yacht safe and in survey: Engine Service (which counts down on engine hours), Hull & Antifouling for the annual haul-out, Winterization and De-winterization around the season, the Safety Equipment check and Life Raft Service, and, for a sailing yacht, the Rigging Inspection and Sail Inspection.
Switch on ground if overdue so a yacht that's out of survey simply can't be booked. From then on Kai shows what's due, counts hour-based jobs down against the real engine-hour reading, and emails you (and your yard, if you like) as each one approaches, comes due, and goes overdue.
7. Sort out the money
However you split the costs, Kai totals what each member owes on their balance. A daily-rate group sees usage turn into invoices automatically (set your VAT rate if you charge it); a shared-cost group sees the fixed costs and any shared expenses divided by ownership share. To collect, you have two easy routes: add your group's IBAN and Kai generates SEPA QR codes members scan to pay, or connect your own Stripe account so members pay online and the money lands directly with you. Neither is required to start. You can settle by hand at first and add online payment whenever you're ready.
What can wait
Plenty. Low-level alerts on fuel and fresh water, document storage for the registration, insurance, and safety certificates, the trips map, accounting sync to your bookkeeping software, in-app messaging for the group. It's all there when you want it, and none of it is in the way of getting started.
Do the seven steps above and you'll have a yacht group that shares the season fairly, keeps every job on schedule, and keeps the costs clear however you choose to split them. Everything else is a refinement you can add once the group is up and sailing.
