Quoting and job costing app for landscapers

What to track on every landscaping job

Landscaping margins hide in three places: materials bought from several suppliers, machines hired by the day, and days lost to the weather. Track all of it against the job it belongs to:

• Crew hours by day, across every site the crew touched
• Materials from each supplier: turf, soil, mulch, gravel, pavers, sleepers, plants and irrigation parts
• Machine and trailer hire: excavators, skid steers, compactors, and the extra day when the weather turns
• Delivery and tip fees: the delivery charge on every load, and green waste and spoil out
• Weather days: the set-up, the pump-out and the half day lost, logged against the job they hit
• Variations: the extra garden bed, the upgrade to a different paver, the second irrigation zone

Pricing landscaping work

A landscaping quote is usually three kinds of line: materials priced per unit (square metres of turf, cubic metres of soil, linear metres of edging), machine hire by the day or hour, and labour by the hour or day. Build each into your price list once with its cost and markup, and quote from templates for the jobs you do often. Check the price list whenever a supplier or nursery changes its prices.

Then decide who carries the weather. You can build a weather allowance into the price, or say in the quote that extra hire days caused by wet weather are charged at cost. Both are fair. Leaving it unsaid means you carry all of it.

A worked example: a sleeper retaining wall

Here is a sleeper retaining wall of about 6 metres by 0.6 metres, priced and then tracked. The numbers are illustrative, and the hourly cost is the landscaper example on the tradie hourly rate calculator: about $96 an hour once wages, super, overheads, the ute, the trailer and the machinery are counted.

Rain stops work after the dig. The excavator stays a second day ($450), and the crew loses six hours to setting up again and pumping out the trench ($576). Costs finish at $6,628, which is 95% of the price, and the profit-at-risk alert fires before the wall is finished, while you can still have the conversation.

Neither column is the 20% the job was priced at, which is the real lesson: once you can see what wet days cost you on a few jobs, you can price them in properly. How to price a landscaping job walks through the full method, from measuring the site to the margin, and quote vs estimate covers how to word the parts of a job you cannot fully see when you price it.

Maintenance rounds

Run each maintenance round as its own job, with the hours, fuel, green waste and any plants logged against it, and you can see whether the round pays for the trailer fuel. There is no automatic recurring job yet, so set up each month or each visit as a job.

Photos, checklists and stage payments

Before and after photos live on the job, which helps with variations and with the client who says the edging was always like that. Bigger builds can be claimed in stages, such as deposit, base works and completion, each a percentage of the price. New accounts set up for landscaping start with three quote templates: turf supply and lay, a mulched garden bed and a sleeper retaining wall, with placeholder prices to replace with yours.

What TrackYaTradie does not do for landscapers

• No design or plan drawing tools, and no area take-offs from a site plan.
• No automatic recurring maintenance jobs.
• No plant or materials inventory, and no purchase orders.
• No GPS tracking or dispatch map. The calendar rosters crews onto jobs by the day.
• Xero only: there is no MYOB or QuickBooks sync.