When the season’s in full swing, it feels like everything’s happening at once. By 9 a.m., your schedule has already fully drifted away from the plan for the day you set at 6. Using scheduling software for landscape business helps you stay on top of that chaos.
Organization makes the difference between you running the week, and the week running you. Losing track of details costs you in paid labor, wasted fuel, and jobs that run well past the hours you bid.
Scheduling software for landscaping business use lays out every employee, every crew, every property, every job. It gives you a full view of where everyone is and what they’re doing, keeps everybody on the same page, and sharpens your job costing.
Keep Everything in One View
A schedule only does its job when everybody is looking at the same one. If you keep important company scheduling info in your notebook, your group text, or your memory, something’s going to get dropped fast.
Your crews cost you money from the second they clock in, whether they’re actively working or sitting in traffic between two jobs on opposite sides of the same town.
If a crew is sent to the wrong job and has to double back, wasting an hour of drive time, or if they don’t receive important information and have to sit around and wait, guess who has to pay for that time where nothing actually got done? (Hint: It’s not the client.)
Scheduling software for landscape business operations pulls every crew, every truck, and every job onto one board that everyone can access and see. You can plan every crew’s route before they leave the shop, saving everyone as much drive time (and fuel) as possible.
That board also keeps everybody in the loop. It tells everyone the address, the scope, the gate code, and customer contact info for every stop.
Now a driver can open the software and see exactly how their day will go, with everything they need to know already attached. Your administrator, back in the office, can check that same record, so they’ll always know where everyone is without having to call the field to check.
Every locked gate, inefficient route, and double-booked job you avoid is money you never lose. Scheduling software for landscape business use gets rid of guesswork, so everyone can focus on billable work.
Handle Changes Without Dropping Anything
Ever heard of Murphy’s Law? “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” Every experienced contractor knows how true that is.
Maybe an unexpected downpour shuts down all your planned afternoon jobs. Maybe a customer calls to move a Thursday install to Monday. Maybe a crew leader calls in sick at 5 a.m. the day a job was scheduled to get completed.
Every single one of those changes has to reach your admin and crew as soon as possible. Otherwise, how will they know not to act on the original plan?
If something gets missed, that shows up in the day: a crew drives across town to work on a job that got cancelled, or an admin accidentally double-books a worker filling in for that absent crew member.
Then those lapses show up in your bank account.
Scheduling software for landscaping business use lets you move a job, swap a crew, or clear a whole day. When a change is made, everybody attached to that schedule gets the same notification at the same time. Nothing gets missed, nothing gets dropped, and nobody wastes time (or profit) you don’t have.
This also applies to changes in the scope of a specific job or project. If a customer decides they want to add a retaining wall to a job already on the books, you can load the new scope onto the job in seconds.
As soon as you do, the crew sees it and plans accordingly. Once they roll up to the site, they’ve already blocked out the right amount of time and work, so the rest of the responsibilities for that day don’t pile up behind a job that changed unexpectedly.
Keep the Office and the Field on the Same Page
Picture this: a customer calls in the early afternoon, asking when the crew will arrive at their property. Your admin doesn’t have a live view of the crews’ location or schedule, so she says “Let me find out and call you back.”
Then she texts the crew leader. He doesn’t respond (he’s a busy guy!), so she texts him again. Then she calls you, because she never got a reply from him.
One quick question from a client evolves into a half-hour chase. Then another customer calls with a question, and it starts all over again. By 5 p.m., your admin has spent most of an entire (busy) day playing telephone operator. And the real work still needs to get done.
That call didn’t leave the customer with the best opinion of your business, either. She asked a simple question, and came away with the impression that your company doesn’t know where its own trucks are.
But what if your company used scheduling software for landscape business planning? Then your admin could look at the board and get a live view of what stops the crew has already completed.
Now that customer question gets an answer on the spot. Your admin sees that the crew is two stops from the customer’s property, and tells the customer to expect them within the hour.
The customer hangs up, satisfied, and your office admin goes back to her own work.
Because landscape scheduling software marks when each stop is done, your office knows a job has run behind before the customer does.
Then you can react by quickly moving or reassigning a different crew, and let the customer know about the change before she even thinks to ask.
Record Your Crew’s Hours for Accurate Job Costing
To find out whether you priced a job accurately, you run job costing: you compare the hours you bid for that job against the hours your crew actually worked on it.
You priced the job based on the bid, so the difference between estimated and actual hours determines whether you made money, or lost it.
Labor is usually your biggest cost on a job, and it’s the easiest to lose track of. An hour of labor only counts against the job if the crew member actually records it. You’re paying him whether he remembers to track his hours or not, but if he doesn’t log his time, that hour doesn’t get tracked to the job. On paper, the job reads like it ran cheaper than it actually did.
For Example…
Say you bid a job at 100 hours, and your crew works 120 hours to get it done. If your labor rate is $100 an hour, those 20 extra hours cost you $2,000, just on that one job.
But what if those 20 extra hours never got tracked? Maybe a few crew members forgot to clock in on that final day, or maybe they were tracking their time on paper notes that never got transferred into your company’s landscaping software.
So after everything’s said and done, on paper, the job took 100 hours, which is exactly what you bid, and nobody notices the $2,000 loss. So on the next similar job, you bid 100 hours again, your crew runs 20 hours over again, and you lose $2,000 on the project. Again.
Keep Job Tracking and Job Costing Consistent
Getting your crew to actually record every hour they work gets harder as the season gets busier.
Your guys work long days. When they start rushing between jobs, faithfully recording their hours for the job they’re working on is one of the first tasks that gets dropped.
It’s not uncommon for a crew member to forget to clock in, or to wait until Friday to enter their hours for the entire week (even though at this point, they can barely remember Tuesday).
What you really need from your crew: every hour they worked, logged to the job they worked on, entered on the day they worked it.
To get everybody on board, tie that habit to their pay. If your crew works hourly, then pay them based on the hours they entered in your scheduling software for landscape business tracking. If somebody forgets to record his time, he only gets paid for the hours logged in the system.
(At Tussey Landscaping, this just is the way it is. Everyone knows it, and they have no issues. It’s just known and accepted that if I want to be paid, I have to enter my hours. No resistance.)
To get the full paycheck, have him open the app and fix his hours himself. If you just correct missing hours every week, your crew will start to assume that your office will do that tracking for them.
Know Where a Job Stands Before it Closes
Most owners do their job costing after the work’s already been done. Once they realize the job ran 20 hours over and ate up $2,000 in profit, it’s already way too late to do anything about it. To fix an overrun, you have to catch it while the crew is still on the job.
One of the greatest benefits of scheduling software for landscape business is that it gives you the power and the data to run job costing while the job is still active. Your crew logs their hours from the job site every day, and the software shows those hours against the hours you bid. You can open an in-progress job and see how many of your bid hours the crew has used, and how many remain.
Say you bid a two-week install at 300 hours. At the end of week one you check the job, and your software shows the crew has already logged 200 hours, with half the work still ahead. At that pace, the job would land at 400 hours, 100 over your bid, and a $10K loss (with a $100 hourly rate).
But since you caught it early, you have time to act. You can move a second crew to the job to keep the hour totals down. You can sit down with the customer and discuss cutting parts of the scope that are driving the overrun.
Those things won’t erase the entire overage, but they do help you cut your losses significantly before the job ends.
Net profit tells you how a job went after the money’s already gone. Landscape scheduling software runs job costing before the job closes, and you can still act.
Stay Organized and in Control With the Right Tools
The season will always move fast. You can’t control the work, the weather, or the customers. But you can control how you handle a packed calendar, and your schedule does more to keep you organized than any other tool you own.
I know (all too well!) how hard it is to run a business when you don’t have a clear view of what’s going on and who needs to be where. That’s one of the reasons we created SynkedUP, an all-in-one software solution built by contractors, for contractors.
SynkedUP takes all of your business’s data and centralizes it into one system that can handle everything from estimating to sending proposals to job costing to, yes, scheduling.
To learn more about how SynkedUP gives contractors the power to bid, win, schedule, and track jobs with confidence, give us a call to book a demo today!