Nobody actually enjoys building a landscaping quote by hand. Quoting has long been a thorn in the side of landscape business owners and it’s easy to see why.
Most landscape contractors get started building their quotes on a scratch pad and iPhone calculator in hand. It feels normal. But as you grow, and do more quotes, it becomes a burden. In the same way that the little job only needed a wheelbarrow, the jobs you do now need a proper machine.
Manually building a landscaping quote from memory also comes with a pretty big catch: every hour spent formatting a document or rerunning the same math is an hour you could have spent on the actual work. Plus, when you build quotes by hand, it’s very easy to price next year’s jobs off last year’s numbers… and end up leaving money on the table.
A slow, inefficient quoting process doesn’t go over well with customers, either. It gives them plenty of time to either change their mind about the job or to just call the next contractor on their list.
Luckily, landscape software offers a better way to quickly and accurately build landscaping quotes. With your budget dialed in and the right software doing the heavy lifting, quoting turns into one of the smoothest parts of your day. You send professional quotes in minutes, track them in real time, collect signatures and down payments automatically, and get back to running your business.
The Hidden Cost of Building Landscaping Quotes by Hand
The manual quoting approach persists because the full cost of that approach will never show up on a single invoice. It shows up as an hour spent reformatting a document, or a job that got priced a little too low, or a customer who decided to go with a different landscaper with a faster response time.
Once you take those pieces and put them together over a season, you’ll find that the hand-built landscaping quote is one of the more expensive habits in the business.
Guessing is a Gamble
Estimating based on your gut or from memory feels fast and accurate, because you’ve done the work hundreds of times, you have the experience, and so the number comes easy. The trouble shows up later.
When you don’t use set, repeatable calculations for quoting, you can’t truly guarantee accuracy or consistency. The same patio job might land with two different prices based on the day, your mood, or how badly you wanted the work when you made the quote.
Those issues will just keep stacking. When that patio job comes in thin on margin, you have no real way to pinpoint exactly what went wrong, so you can’t correct it next time. And you keep on guessing.
Paperwork Keeps You From Paid Work
Every hand-built quote comes with the promise of time-consuming busywork. You format the document, tailor it to the client, and print it. Then a single line item changes, so you have to edit and print it again.
Every round eats time that you could have spent on billable work. Or time that you could have spent at home with your family after a busy day. The work feels productive when you’re doing it, but none of that time puts money in your pocket.
Slow Quotes Send Clients to Someone Else
When a prospective client reaches out, they’re usually evaluating a few contractors at once. The one who responds with a clean, professional landscaping quote the quickest looks like the most responsive, and the most serious about the project.
A quote that takes three or more days to pull together gives the client time to cool off, or rethink the project. Or they’ll just sign with a different landscaping contractor, who turned that quote around in under an hour. The work was yours to lose, and thanks to your slow turnaround, you lost it.
Old Numbers Invade New Quotes
Here’s the factor that does the most damage over a season. When you’re booked solid and firing off quotes for next year’s schedule, it’s easy to reach for pricing you already know by heart.
But building next year’s prices using this year’s costs will come back to haunt you. Come spring, the quotes you built in the fall won’t account for the new equipment you bought, or the higher cost of fuel.
A landscaping quote built on old numbers comes out underpriced, often without the contractor actually catching it. You don’t feel the discrepancy at all, until you finally take a second to think and wonder, “How is it possible that we’re cranking through these jobs and I have no money in the bank?”
When that repeats across a full schedule, the shortfall adds up fast.
Accurate Quotes Start With Knowing Your Numbers
If you want to build a faster process, you need to kill uncertainty in your numbers. Waffling over the numbers you’ve just generated is the exact thing that leaves your quote sitting on the desk, instead of getting it to your customer as soon as possible.
That starts with your budget.
Your landscaping budget is the foundation for knowing your numbers. Build your budget carefully, and every landscaping quote you build off of it inherits that accuracy. Neglect your budget, and you’re back to guessing.
Setting Markups
Your landscaping budget acts as your single source of truth for what jobs cost, and what you need to charge to make profit. It produces the basis for your manhour price and your markup percentages, but the landscaping quote will only be as reliable as the numbers you give it.
That means that keeping your budget updated matters more than any single quote you’ll use it to send. Get the inputs right, and the pricing will follow.
Accounting for Unbillable Labor
Unbillable hours cover all the payroll hours that you can’t put on a customer’s invoice. That includes shop work, equipment maintenance, training and meetings, and warranty callbacks. Those unbillable hours cost you, the owner, real money, so they belong in your budget as an overhead expense.
The real challenge of accounting for unbillable labor is answering one million-dollar question: “How do I find out how many unbillable hours I should budget for?” If you track timesheet hours in a landscaping app or other form of reliable software, you already have the answer. If you haven’t started tracking yet, 15-20% of your total payroll numbers is a safe average.
Keeping Costs Current
Go through your equipment on your budget line by line. Did you account for everything? Add anything you bought recently.
Pro tip: add things you intend to buy or wish you could buy in the future, and see how it impacts your labor rate. You may just decide to pull the trigger and start selling jobs at that new rate now, and build the cash to make the purchase you want.
Go into detail and add everything. Everything means all trucks, trailers, equipment and machines, laser levels, cutoff saws, blowers, job trailer tools, compactors, attachments, and so on. Anything over around $1,000 should earn its own line item.
A single ‘Misc Tools’ line can hold your spend on the little things like trowels, levels, shovels, and drills. If you expect to spend around $3,000 a year on hand tools, that’s the number you use.
When reviewing your equipment and updating your budget, make sure the “purchase price” of the equipment reflects up-to-date pricing. For example, maybe you added a skid loader to your budget 10 years ago when you bought it, and you bought it for $50k. With inflation, it’s very likely that the machine is now closer to the $60-70k purchase price.
Update all those purchase prices on all your equipment to current-day pricing so your landscaping quote recovers what that equipment actually costs.
Cover Overhead
Overhead is an easy place to forget to include an expense and then never notice it’s gone. Avoid this by building your budget’s overhead list so it matches your Profit and Loss statement line for line.
That way you can compare the two and catch what slipped through: the shirts you bought for the crew, the fuel you overspent on, and so on. Once everything’s included, give yourself a “fluff factor” of another 5-10% and throw that on top. Your fluff factor acts as a safety cushion for all the expenses you’ll never fully predict.
Protect Yourself, and Your Profit
Your profit represents what remains after you’ve been paid your owner’s salary and settled all your bills.
If you aren’t paying yourself, you need to start. Owner’s pay represents a cost the business has to cover, just like fuel or insurance. After all, you went into business to build a better life for you, your family and your team. The business can only do that when it turns a real profit on top of everyone’s pay.
A healthy budget produces a net profit of 10% or more, and 15-20+% is a good target to build toward.
The Price is the Price
Once you dial in your numbers, you need to charge what the budget produces and hold the line. The job costs what it costs. If somebody asks why something costs what it does, you have the numbers to back you up. Negotiation should not happen over these numbers. If the customer wants a lower price, negotiate over the scope of the work instead.
And go improve your sales skills! Seriously. This may sound like tough love, but too many contractors complain about the “cheaper guy” and have next to zero sales skills. Once you have your numbers, go master the art of sales. Sales isn’t about convincing somebody to give you money. It’s about finding out what the customer actually wants, and then giving them exactly that.
The Right Software Handles Every Step
Once you have your numbers set, you need the tools to quickly turn those numbers into a professional landscaping quote. Here’s where landscaping software earns its keep. All that manual work you’ve carried gets absorbed into a single tool, built to handle the job.
The right software can also house the budget you just built, so speed and accuracy come from one place.
Templates Do the Heavy Lifting
Good quoting software builds around templates, so you never have to start from a blank page. Those templates let you input the project details, select services and materials, add measurements, and generate a professional-looking landscaping quote in minutes.
Templates save you from having to reformat a document for the tenth time, or check your math by hand. They cover the range of work you do, from residential maintenance to commercial installations, and everything in between.
Quote From Anywhere
Landscaping doesn’t happen at a desk, so your quoting shouldn’t have to, either. Software that comes with a mobile app lets you build a landscaping quote right from the field. No matter where you are, the customer gets a fast, professional response, and you get to move on with your day.
Seamless Centralization
Cloud-based tools keep all quoting activity in a single system. You can manage projects, track expenses, and collaborate with your team in real time, so you can stop juggling paper forms, spreadsheets, and disconnected tools.
The right platforms can also easily integrate with the software you already have, including accounting systems and CRMs, so your quoting ties into the rest of the business. With your budget in that same system, every landscaping quote you build draws on the real numbers you set. The speed of the software links directly back to the accuracy you worked for in the first place.
Digital Landscaping Quotes Keep the Deal Moving Forward
Paper quotes stop working the moment they leave your hands. You send that quote, then you wait, and wonder, and follow up with a phone call that may or may not get returned.
A digital landscaping quote, however, keeps doing its job after you send it, and that follow-through is where a lot of the manual process breaks down.
Send It and See What Happens Next
When you send a landscaping quote electronically, you can track its status in real time. You know when it went out, and you know the second the customer opens it.
That single data point lets you know when to follow up. You can reach out when the job is still fresh in their mind, without having to guess whether they saw it. The customer then moves through the decision with less friction, and you don’t have to worry about chasing paper.
Signatures and Down Payments, Handled for You
The biggest benefit offered by a digital landscaping quote happens after the customer says yes. One action lets you deliver that quote, notify you when the quote gets viewed, collect signed approval on the contract, and gather a down payment.
Steps that used to stretch across days of phone tag, paperwork and misused emails get handled in a single sitting.
Quotes That Win the Work
A digital landscaping quote lets you, the contractor, make a stronger case for the job. You can personalize each quote to the client. Add detailed descriptions of the proposed work, itemized pricing (so they’ll know exactly what they’re paying for) and images that help them visualize the final result.
A clear, detailed quote states a price, yes, but it also does more than that. It’s a chance to show your expertise and attention to detail, and help build trust with the client before a single shovel hits the ground.
Get Back to the Work That Matters
Before you can fix your landscaping quote process, you need two things. First, you need accurate numbers from a budget that you’ve taken the time to build right. Second, fast professional quote delivery comes from smart software that handles busywork for you.
Put them together, and you no longer have to dread working on quotes at the end of the long day. Quoting becomes a simple, repeatable process. Something you knock out in minutes, confident that the price is right and the customer will receive it before your competition ever calls them back.
When your pricing is solid and your landscaping quote system runs smoothly, you’ll find it easier to cover your costs and make a real profit. You can build a business that serves you, without running you into the ground.
And that’s exactly why I built SynkedUP, a landscape management software built by contractors, for contractors. Book a call and we’ll show you how SynkedUP can build, customize, send and track your landscaping quotes. Once you see the difference for yourself, you’ll wonder how you ever managed the old way.
