A strong landscape estimate starts with a strong understanding of what happens on the job site, not what you hope will happen. Some contractors, as a rule, use educated guesswork to reach a figure, but that figure is often less tied to job reality than that contractor might think.
When contractors base their estimates on actual historical data from past jobs, real-world labor and material usage, those numbers aren’t guesswork; they’re grounded in reality. The more you measure and plug that data back into your estimate, the more accurate your estimates will become. In this article, we’ll walk you through how tracking job data can improve a landscape estimate, and we’ll also discuss how job data can be harnessed and used to build pricing models that reflect reality, not just best-case scenarios.
Guessing Costs You More Than You Think
Many experienced contractors build estimates from memory or from sheer habit, especially for services they’ve done hundreds of times. A “shoot from the hip” estimate approach might work occasionally, but over time, it’ll create blind spots. Without consulting actual data, you have no real way of knowing exactly how close your landscape estimate is to the true cost of completing a job with your desired profit margins.
Guessing tends to ignore small inconsistencies that will just keep building if you don’t address them. If you’re guessing on estimates, or just throwing market rates at it, and you lose money on the job, it’s hard to know what needs to change on the next estimate to prevent repeating the mistake.
Guessing on an estimate can also result in contractors neglecting hidden costs like equipment wear, material waste, or extra drive time. Errors caused by bad estimating will take a hit on your margins. More than that, though, those errors will create scheduling problems, stress out crews, and make it harder for you to run your business the way you want to.
The best way to create a landscape estimate is by using real job data tracked by your business’s past jobs. Every job you complete without tracking time, labor hours and material usage is an opportunity lost forever. That data is the key to breaking out of the cycle of guessing on estimates and then seeing what happens.
Without data, at best you’ll forever be the only one within your company able to create an estimate for jobs. At worst, it’ll take you much longer to estimate, and your estimates won’t even be reliable.
The Job Data That Improves Future Estimates
While having years of experience under your belt will undoubtedly make your landscape estimates more accurate, experience alone isn’t the same thing as knowing your numbers. To do that you need to track everything you do on a job. These are the things that matter the most:
- Labor Hours: Labor hours for a job should be tracked by task, as well as by who (or which crew) is executing each task. Knowing the total hours of labor per job is useful, but when you break it down by task, you’ll get a better idea of any delays or pain points that may have cropped up over the course of the job. Tracking time over enough jobs this way, patterns will start to emerge that will help you better predict how long each part of a job should take. Don’t overthink this part. Keep it simple. For example, just track hours to each part of the job: Patio, Lighting, and Planting. I’m usually not a fan of tracking hours to the minute-level detail of excavating, base prep, screeding, laying pavers, etc. It requires too much effort from the crew and tends to not be accurate enough to be useful anyway. It’s better to have simpler data that you know is accurate, because you can rely on it to inform my next estimate.
- Equipment Use: Equipment usage tracking should include machine time, transportation, and the cost of maintenance. Equipment obviously adds efficiency to production, but it also adds cost. When contractors don’t account for equipment costs, that money will end up coming out of your profit margin.
- Material usage: You should be tracking and logging material usage as it actually happens, not before or after the fact. It’s pretty common for contractors to over-order “just in case,” but if you don’t track the waste leftover, you won’t be able to refine material estimates in the future.
- Other factors: Metrics are important, but job data isn’t just about the numbers. Details such as weather delays, site conditions, and the crew’s experience should also be recorded as part of the job history. These factors will absolutely impact job performance, but they often get ignored during the creation of a landscape estimate. Adding relevant notes gives context to discrepancies, making it easier to adjust expectations for future jobs. The principle to remember here is when you’re estimating, estimate for worst-case scenario, so that when worst-case happens, it doesn’t kill your profits.
How to Turn Raw Data Into Reliable Production Rates
Job data becomes a powerful tool when it is used to calculate job production rates. A production rate is a figure for the amount of work completed per hour for a specific task. For example, how many square feet of pavers could a crew install per hour under average conditions? The answer to that question would be the production rate for that task. That rate can then be used to create your landscape estimate.
After you’ve tracked the same type of job multiple times, you can average the results together to create a baseline rate. Having a baseline rate makes your estimating even more accurate, and creates a more predictable workflow. It begins your transition from estimating based on experience, to estimating based on real world data.
Estimating based on data makes it much easier for you to delegate estimating to other people, because you dumb down the estimating process all the way to the point of just entering measurements, and the production rates produce the quantity of labor hours and materials needed.
Outliers will still happen, because it’s impossible to account for everything. But with enough jobs logged, the data will be able to account for those outliers. One crew having a lousy day won’t throw off your entire system for creating a landscape estimate. As your production rates become more refined, your pricing will become more consistent, even across different crews and job conditions. This will help when you create an accurate estimate for a larger project, because you can explain exactly where the numbers you’re quoting came from.
How Data-Driven Estimates Increase Profit
An accurate estimate will lead to fewer surprises on the job site, which is a huge bonus for you. When you know how long tasks take and how much they cost, the price your estimate produces reflect the true scope of the work. This will ensure that you hit your target profit margin on each job.
Having access to reliable data will also protect your business from job creep. If a client asks for extra work, you have the numbers to look at and easily provide an estimate of how much that extra work will cost, and how long it will take. Over time, better estimates will lead to better scheduling, because you’ll know the best ways to book jobs, stay productive, and reduce overlap without overextending yourself.
SynkedUP Builds a System That Grows With You
Good landscape estimating is not about being perfect, it’s about learning from and growing with each job. Every time you collect job data, you’re working to build a system that gets stronger and stronger. But you don’t have to go it alone!
SynkedUP, a software platform built by contractors, for contractors, turns job tracking, costing, and estimating into a fast, easy, and repeatable process. In fact, once you sign up, you’ll be able to start pricing your first job within an hour. Start by taking 5-10 minutes to fill out the Budget Builder form. From there, estimating is a breeze with our pre-built landscape estimate templates, which ensure that every necessary detail in your estimate is accounted for. All you need to do is enter measurements and items into your estimate. SynkedUP will then instantly calculate costs, overhead, and profit margins for that job.
Not only does using SynkedUP help make sure that your estimate will be accurate and data-based, it has the potential to cut your estimating time by up to 90%! Build your estimate in minutes, not hours or days. Once your estimate is complete, SynkedUP can generate a professional proposal with just one click. You’ll be notified as soon as the customer opens the proposal, and they’ll automatically receive an invoice once that budget is approved.
SynkedUP offers a mobile app with full offline capability, so that you’ll know exactly how a job is progressing in real time, whether you’re in the office or out in the field. The app lets users tracki time in the field, for both billable and unbillable time, to help ensure your estimating always stays in touch with your reality.
If you’re ready to improve your job estimating, we’re ready to help! We offer clients a quick, painless onboarding process, with on-demand videos to explain everything, and a live chat with an on-call expert to answer any questions you may have. To learn more about SynkedUP and the ways we can boost your business, schedule a demo with us today!
