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How could your business change for the better if you had a crystal ball handy? What would you do differently if you could get a good read on exactly where your company’s year stands at any given moment? While the idea of peering into a crystal ball to tell your company’s future seems silly, let’s be honest. Do you forecast your year based on good intentions and a fraction of the data you need to do so? Are you staring at your company’s financials and incomplete reports just hoping it will magically happen? 

You’ve already reached a point where you know landscaping business software is necessary. You’re dealing with too many different systems that require multiple data entry and you’re just not operating as efficiently as you could be. There are simply too many sources of wasted time when it comes to running your landscape business. Having more than one system with none of them communicating with one another has made life challenging. You know things could be going much better but right now it’s all starting to feel like one big mess.

At this point you know you want an all-in-one system but you’re overwhelmed by the options out there. Beginning the process of researching companies feels like an enormous task and you don’t even know where to start.

Keeping track of data is incredibly important when it comes to snow operations. But it can also be a completely overwhelming task. How often do you not end up getting your bills out to the client until two or three weeks after a major snow event? That may not seem like a long time but it’s long enough to put a wrench in your cash flow.

In sales you always do your best with the information that you have available. When it comes to selling a landscaping job and giving the customer an approximate timeline for when the job will be completed, you can only work with what you’ve been given by the rest of your team. You put your trust in them that they’ll get the work done in the time table they’ve provided.

However, in the instances where the ball is dropped and the timeline gets pushed back, the customer’s frustrations wind up falling back on you. When a job doesn’t get completed on time, you’re left to deal with an angry customer who feels as though they’ve been lied to. They don’t realize you’ve done your best. Now you have to do what you can to keep them happy so they don’t abandon your company and cause you to lose your hard-earned commission.

If you’re like a lot of landscape business owners you might decide how much to charge for labor simply by using gut instinct. You might have asked around and have a sense of what most companies in the area pay their laborers and you aim to pay your people somewhere in that same vicinity.

Then, after factoring in what you think your overhead recovery will be, you determine a price. Or maybe you take an even less systematic approach and simply take what you pay your laborers and double it.

But when it comes to something as important as your profitability, neither of these approaches are ideal. At the end of the day, you’re shooting in the dark. If you can’t immediately answer the more important question “Will this job be profitable?”, then there is a cause for concern.

Operations is often the first place where owners or accounting departments look when profits aren’t hitting the mark. The big question is whether inventory is being managed properly and without waste. But it is an overwhelming task to keep track of hundreds or thousands of plants, yards packed with skids of hardscape materials, multiple piles of mulch and stone, and even warehouses full of materials.

Attempting to track those materials with spreadsheets and paperwork is exhausting and prone to error. That can lead to frustrated crews who can’t find the materials they need and may require them taking unplanned trips to pick up supplies. But it’s not only productivity that can take a hit. Selling is much less effective when there’s not an accurate record of available supplies for any given job.

In your landscape company, it’s a challenge trying to make the numbers match. There are many reasons why you’re losing profits. You know that your overhead costs are out of control and it’s costing you.

The company is stagnating or losing money because you’re getting inaccurate data and your people sometimes forget to enter additional purchases, and paperwork doesn’t reflect what’s truly happening.

As an owner or operations manager for a landscaping company, you have a tough job. You need to keep a lot balls in the air—juggling schedules, communicating with sales and the office staff, managing labor crews, and making sure the right equipment and plant materials are there for each job.

Things change quickly in your landscaping company. First, work orders change―and you’re the last one to find out because the paperwork didn’t get to you in time.

Next, you need to constantly change job information on the master whiteboard. And it can get so chaotic with moving crews around and optimizing routes that the whiteboard doesn’t even make sense anymore.

You need completed timesheets, work orders and incident reports on time. You constantly remind your field supervisors that you need all of the receipts from his team’s stops at the local nursery.

As you know, QuickBooks was great software when your landscaping company was small. However, your company has grown over the past years. In essence, you need more from your landscaping software than what QuickBooks can provide.

Even though Quickbooks has some of the the same capabilities as landscaping software when it comes to reporting taxes, paying vendors on time as well as keeping accurate billing, you need something more.

In this article, you’ll learn about a software program designed to replace QuickBooks in your landscaping business.