Two businesses in one truck
Almost every landscaping company is really running two operations at once, and they pull in opposite directions. There is installation — patios, retaining walls, plantings, grading — which is a small number of large, individually quoted projects. And there is maintenance — mowing, trimming, cleanups — which is a large number of small, near-identical visits that repeat all season.
Software written for one is usually bad at the other. A tool built around big project quotes makes you rebuild a $65 lawn cut from scratch every week. A tool built around recurring service has no good way to price a 400-square-foot flagstone patio with three material options. The practical answer is templates: price each recurring service once, and keep the estimator flexible enough to build a real install quote line by line when you need to.
What belongs on an install quote
Install work is where margin is won and lost, and it is almost always lost on the things nobody wrote down. The lines worth having on a template:
- Site prep and excavation — sod removal, grading, and the disposal that goes with it
- Base and aggregate — by tonne or by yard, with the depth stated on the line
- Materials — stone, plants, mulch, edging, priced per unit so a change in scope changes the number visibly
- Labour — banded by crew size and day, not buried in the material price
- Equipment — skid steer, plate compactor, dump trailer, as their own line
- Disposal and tipping — a real cost that quietly eats install jobs when it is absorbed
- Locates and access notes — not a price, but worth recording against the job
Maintenance billing without the monthly rebuild
Maintenance is where admin time disappears. Forty clients on a weekly cut means forty invoices a month, all identical apart from the address. CrewQuote handles this with saved templates: the visit is priced once, and each billing cycle you load it against the client rather than retyping it.
To be straight about the limit — CrewQuote does not currently charge saved cards automatically on a recurring schedule. You send the invoice and the client pays it. If fully automatic subscription billing for maintenance clients is the one thing you cannot work without, a dedicated field-service platform will serve you better than we will, and it is better that you know that now than after you have moved your data across.
Routing a maintenance day
On install days routing barely matters, because you are at one address. On maintenance days it is most of the cost. Twelve stops in a bad order can add an hour of driving to a day that only bills eight. CrewQuote's route planner takes the jobs scheduled for a given day and lays them out as an ordered driving route on a map, so the person in the truck is following a sequence rather than picking the next address off a list.
Crews who should not see your pricing
Seasonal staff turn over. If you give a crew member a crew-level login, they see the day's jobs, the addresses, the site notes and the photos, and they can mark work done and upload photos of their own. They do not see your rate card, your margins or your full client list. Estimators, admins and owners get progressively more access. This matters more in landscaping than in most trades simply because of how many people pass through a crew over a season.
At the end of the month, invoices export as CSV in the format QuickBooks and Wave import, so the bookkeeping side does not become a second data-entry job.