More than 10 years ago, Akehurst Landscape Service, Inc. in Joppa, Maryland, lost its office manager to retirement. The manager had handled accounts, billing and other critical administrative tasks for 27 years. Replacing this position was a challenge in itself, but because all the administrative work was being done manually, the company faced other challenges that also required immediate attention:

• Heavy workloads meant late billing or bills that were missed entirely.
• Crews frequently did extra work that was not being tracked and billed.
• Manually-prepared paper forms and accounting were more prone to errors.
• Tracking of costs and income, project profitability and other vital measures were virtually impossible.
• Office staff turnover was costly in terms of gaps and potential errors in administrative work and downtime during training.

Faced with these challenges, Vice President and Landscape Department Director Bill Akehurst decided it was time to investigate implementation of business management software to assist his team in improving operations.

Akehurst was thorough in reviewing his options. He evaluated at least 12 software solutions, including national off-the-shelf business management products as well as four software packages designed specifically for landscape businesses.

His choice? Asset™, with Estimate Anywhere™, because it:

• Delivered a single solution that manages projects from the start to end — first sales call to final invoice. It handles everything in between as well — including the general ledger and balance sheets
• Allowed full customization and was easily adaptable to the way they already did business—where other choices were not. Asset™ let them print forms and reports that looked exactly like the paper documents they were already comfortable using
• Offered more capabilities beyond what they needed immediately, so it gave them room to grow
• Managed all aspects of the business, as needed. For example, other choices didn’t offer payroll (which they needed). Those packages required them to also purchase a third-party payroll system
• Made it easy to train new employees because there was a process for every position.

With Asset™, the company was able to accurately bill customers for all work performed, track costs precisely by project and reduce the overall workload for the in-house administrative staff. Most importantly, it provided added transparency and accountability for the entire organization.

Akehurst puts the results simply, "Include took our 131-year-old firm from a mom-and-pop shop to a company with a real accountability with trackable duties. Our company is now 10 times the revenue size it was in 1996. Now with over 100 employees, we’re running our entire operation on Asset™ and EstimateAnywhere™, and can instantly see what's working right and what's not."