You owe three proposals to customers who called this week. One crew is wrapping a landscape project across town, with an install lined up. Your best worker just texted that he can’t make it in today. And there’s a client on the phone asking why her patio still sits half-finished.
Basically, a normal Tuesday.
Days tend to pass quickly and chaotically for landscape contractors. There’s a lot of fires to put out, and only one you. So a neat, orderly closeout process probably isn’t high on your list of priorities. The minute you finish a job, you’re standing on the gas headed for the next one.
Why push for a closeout routine when you’re already stretched so thin?
I talk a lot about how more contractors should slow down to speed up. When you don’t take a pause after each landscape project, you lose an opportunity to learn from the job you just finished.
How did the project go? What went well? What didn’t? What did you learn that you can carry forward to the next job?
Sticking to a closeout checklist protects your opportunity for education and growth. Even if your closeout process only runs you two minutes, those two minutes may just save you hours later.
How Does a Landscape Project Closeout Pay You Back?
Your closeout process gives you a read on the job you just completed. It helps you know how much money you made (or lost), and where the job ran past the estimate.
When you rush to the next project on the schedule without making sure that the last one got closed out correctly, you might:
- Forget to send the final invoice, or invoicing any add-ons
- Not realize that you’ve underestimated labor or materials (again)
- Lose an opportunity to inform and educate your crew on how to improve
- Miss out on analyzing what you’d do differently on a job if you had the chance to do it again
- Skip the opportunity to collect reviews, and impress the customer with your attention to detail
All of these things end up costing you money, a better estimate next time, or a glowing review that could have helped you boost your business.
So create a landscape project closeout checklist, and set a rule for what earns a spot: keep only the items that help you make better decisions on the next job. Logging your crew hours should make the cut. Anything that just generates more paperwork probably won’t.
1. Log Every Hour to the Job
Did every hour your crew worked get logged to the landscape project you just completed?
You have to track your hours, and track them accurately. If you don’t, you’ll only be able to guess at how many man-hours the job actually used. Man-hours are what set your labor cost. Your labor cost sets the price you should be charging, and the price you should quote on the next job of the same type.
Labor is one of the most important costs on a job. It’s also the toughest number to get right.
It’s easy to lose track of where the hours are going. Maybe a crew member tracks all his time on a notepad, instead of in your company’s scheduling software. Maybe another does extra work but consistently forgets to log it.
Inaccurate data leads to an inaccurate labor record, which will make it nearly impossible to price your work at its actual worth. The next number you bid will be too low. Then the deficit gets baked into every estimate you build after that, until it finally shows up in your margins.
Get your labor hours accurate, and they’ll give you the real man-hours total for your last landscape project. You can also feed them into the estimated-versus-actual review you should do after every job, to see where your bid missed.
The Bottom Line
Before you close out a project, you need to confirm three things:
- Every crew member logged and posted their hours
- Any callback or warranty hours are included
- The hours are all tracked to the specific landscape project and the specific tasks that used them.
2. Record All Receipts and Expenses
Did every dollar you spent on your most recent landscape project get logged to the job?
The big material order usually does get recorded. The small costs are what often get missed: the extra pallet of pavers that you got mid-week, the second dumpster, the run for two more bags of polymeric sand.
None of those costs alone rack up big numbers, but just two or three unprocessed receipts could lead to you recording a higher profit for the job than what you actually made.
You need an accurate account of your expenses to tell you
- Whether the job actually made money
- Where you bought short or long on materials, so you’ll have a better idea of what amounts to order the next time you do a similar job
When you know what a job actually costs you, you have a better idea of how to price the next one. See it in action for yourself with SynkedUP’s free labor rate calculator. Our AI assistant walks you through using your costs (crew wages, labor burden, overhead, etc.) to calculate the best hourly rate for you to charge.
The Bottom Line
Collect receipts from your crew the same week the work happens. Then log each cost to this specific job.
3. Confirm the Job is Fully Invoiced
Did you bill this job in full?
You only get paid for the work you invoice. Any hours or materials you spent on the job but never billed for, you essentially gave the client for free.
The base contract always (hopefully) gets sent out. What tends to get missed are the add-ons, like a change order the client approved mid-job, or a small repair you handled without writing it down.
Besides cheapening your labor, unbilled add-ons also explain a lot of cash flow trouble. If you finished a landscape project and the money in the bank doesn’t match the labor you put in, maybe you priced the job too low…or maybe there’s work you skipped billing.
The Bottom Line
Walk the finished job, taking into account the original proposal and the actual work, including any approved add-ons. Then confirm that the final invoice contained everything, that it went out, and that the client received it.
4. Compare Estimated Hours Against Actual Hours
Did you compare your estimated hours to the actual hours a job took, and talk it through with your crew?
This is a step we call job costing, and it helps you catch where you underestimated the last bid before it costs you on the next one.
When the actual hours you spent on a landscape project run past what you quoted, you know that the job ran long. Your crew can help you determine why it ran long. The guy on your crew who actually set the pavers on a job will probably know the reason for an overrun long before you do.
Keep the conversation short. Pull up the estimate, show the actual hours, and ask two questions:
- Where did the time go?
- What would we do differently if we ran this landscape project again?
Write down the answers, then carry that knowledge into the next quote you build.
It’s always a good idea to bring your crew in on stuff like this. If you show them exactly how logged hours help shape both the estimate and the job costing, they’ll realize why you keep nagging them to fill out their time cards. They’re logging important data, not just filling out boring paperwork.
The Bottom Line
Sit down with your crew. Compare estimated hours against actual hours on the landscape project you just completed. Ask what drove any overrun and what you’d change, and record the fixes for your next bid.
5. Ask for a Review and Thank the Client
Did you ask the client for a five-star review before you moved on?
The day you finish a landscape project for a client is also the day the client is happiest with your work. Ask them to leave a review then. The longer you wait, the less likely that they’ll actually do it.
Send a short message to the client, asking for a review. Link them directly to the page where they should leave it. You might also consider giving them a small thank-you gift, or a handwritten note. It’ll cost you very little, and make the client more likely to refer you to friends or neighbors.
A lot of homeowners looking to hire contractors read the reviews on landscapers’ Google and Facebook pages. The more five-star reviews they see, the more likely they are to give you a call. So the client you please on this landscape project writes the review that wins you the next one.
The Bottom Line
Send the client a request for a review the day the job finishes. Giving the client a thank-you note or a small gift might also win you referrals.
Keep Your Landscape Project Closeout Process Short
Your business’s closeout checklist can be longer than this. It’s more likely than not that you’ll add items as you develop this process.
Just make sure that you keep the checklist limited to items that will help you run your next landscape project better. Drop anything that might lead to paperwork you’ll never use again.
I’m not telling you to play office admin here, and I’m definitely not giving you busy work. You use a closeout checklist to sharpen your next estimate, not to file more reports.
Abraham Lincoln once (allegedly) said that if you have six hours to chop down a tree with an axe, you should spend the first 5 hours sharpening the axe. Your closeout does the same work.
The few minutes you spend reviewing a completed job will save you hours of guesswork (and protect your margin) on every job that comes next.
Turn Every Completed Job Into a Sharper Bid
Use these five checks to build a short routine you can run after you finish every landscape project your business comes on: log your crew’s hours to the job, record every receipt and expense, confirm you billed all the work, compare your estimated to your actual hours, and ask the client for a review.
If you keep to that routine after every job, every project you complete will help you improve for the job you take on next. Your labor and materials numbers get more accurate, and your bids consistently match what your work costs.
If you don’t, you’ll have to keep guessing at why the job ran long, and where all the money went.
The Bottom Line
Tracking all this info by hand gets really disorganized, really fast, which is exactly how things get missed and estimates stay wrong.
We built our all-in-one estimating software, SynkedUP, to capture and hold all of that data for you, from crew hours to production rates to material costs. The automated system then takes your business’s real numbers and plugs them back in to help you find your rates, build accurate estimates, and cost jobs with confidence.
Ready to learn more about what your business can achieve with our tools? Book a call today to see how SynkedUP can help your business build better for the future.