Still writing landscaping estimates the old-fashioned, manual way? Here are four big problems automating your landscape estimate process helps you solve, leading to bigger time savings and better profits.
Big Problem #1: Errors due to unavailable or inconsistent production standards negatively impact overall profit, such as:
Big Problem #2: Manual calculations for estimates are tedious and time consuming, preventing techs from:
Big Problem #3: Customers misplace and lose paper quotes, leading to:
Big Problem #4: No regular follow-up occurs on open estimates, resulting in:
To solve these problems and provide landscaping and lawn care clients with timely, accurate estimates, many landscape companies turn to landscaping estimate software to streamline the process.
A simple online search for “landscape estimate template” will provide tons of free, downloadable landscaping estimate forms.
These templates help landscapers to calculate estimated costs for landscaping work.
If you’re still a small business that scribbles down “guesstimates” for customers using pen and paper, then a free landscaping estimate template may be the way to go.
While a landscape cost estimate sheet and other free quote templates can help business owners price landscaping jobs, that’s really all they do.
→ Most free templates only calculate labor and material costs on a job.
→ Landscapers need to incorporate a percentage of overhead costs and markups into the total cost to track profitability accurately.
→ Branded quote templates with company logos improve brand recognition and help companies portray themselves professionally.
Improving accuracy and consistency in your job bids is vital to growing your business.
With landscape estimating software like Aspire, you not only gain the functionality to price landscaping jobs, but the business management software also streamlines all the other parts of your business, including:
Other direct costs are automatically factored into your estimates to help ensure profitability.
If you’re serious about growing your residential or commercial landscaping business, it may be time to ditch the Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, Google docs, or even paper worksheets and business forms and explore the benefits of landscape estimating software.
A comprehensive, all-in-one software solution like Aspire Business Management Software can help you create detailed estimates and connect the other core features of your business, such as:
To decide which landscape estimating template works best for their business, landscapers must dig into both options to weigh the pros and cons.
Will a free landscape estimate template suffice for now, or do you need an all-in-one software solution that allows customized estimate templates for landscaping and connects all your business processes?
In this post, we’ll detail how Aspire landscape software works seamlessly to integrate a landscape company’s most important features, including estimating, to allow landscape contractors to drive revenue growth and maximize efficiency.
Want to see how Aspire’s Business Management Software works to streamline landscape business operations? Request a demo for a free walk-through of the features we describe throughout this article.
They’re free, of course. Landscapers can simply find one that works for their business, download a PDF landscaping template, fill in the sections, and then turn it into a printable landscaping estimate template to deliver to the customer.
While these types of free proposal templates work slightly better than the old-school pen-and-paper method, they still come with a few drawbacks that can impact the profitability of your landscape business.
Complications and lost time arise from:
In general, standalone landscape estimate forms:
→ Fail to connect important elements of a landscaping business
→ Provide little financial insight into the overall costs and profit margins needed to run a successful operation.
Inaccurate and inconsistent contractor estimates based solely on instinct or past job results — rather than actual company data — can result in unhappy customers and profit loss.
Landscaping estimate software ties in directly to streamline other core business operations, such as your:
With Aspire's integrated estimating functionality, landscape contractors effortlessly and accurately bid projects of any size or complexity.
Instead of being stumped when your customers ask:
→ ”How much do landscapers charge per hour?”
→ “How much does landscaping cost per square foot?”
Landscaping business management software helps you deliver the right answers and the right professional proposal at the right profit margin.
“Free” works for most budgets — including landscaping businesses. We get it.
But, ultimately, you get what you pay for. You can probably figure out your material costs per square foot with a free template, but are you calculating the actual cost of labor into your prices by including:
→ What about accounting for price hikes on landscaping materials or project delays caused by unforeseen weather or supply-chain issues?
A “free” landscaping business estimate template that doesn’t consider your company’s needs may cost you more in the long run.
Using a free download for your landscaping quotes may be fast (and cheap!) but ultimately, you’re preventing your business from accessing benefits provided by an integrated estimate and quote platform.
→ Free templates weren't designed to be a database for your business' production standards.
In the following section, we explore what to include in a polished and professional landscaping estimate template and how Aspire’s landscaping estimate software features work to consolidate all of a landscape business’s essential operations into one platform.
Aspire’s pre-built landscape estimate templates help landscape contractors deliver everything from:
✔ Simple and easy lawn-mowing estimates to…
✔ Elaborate and complicated bids for construction jobs or commercial properties.
You can even build a variety of production-rate kits for common recurring services, such as mulch installation, spring and fall cleanups, and weekly turf maintenance
A professional and polished landscaping estimate template should include the following:
Aspire helps your business:
Our software facilitates connectivity among all of a landscape business's core elements, beginning when a customer asks for a quote.
Contractors gain complete visibility into their landscaping business with Aspire’s end-to-end functionality. They’re empowered to:
✔ Make better decisions
✔ Price their services right
✔ Increase their profitability
Here’s a breakdown of how estimating landscaping jobs within Aspire works and how the robust estimating features in our business management software drive value for growing landscape companies.
Taking you well beyond the sample free template above, Aspire Business Management Software allows you to customize your landscape company’s estimates with the following:
The platform then stores the data for easy access each time you write a landscaping estimate for a customer.
Aspire Software Solutions Engineer Tabitha McComas says the software helps contractors speed up their estimating process right from the start, with language preset for typical scopes of work within each landscaping division, whether:
“Within those different divisions, you can have different templates set up for the common services’ scopes of work,” she explains. “They don't all have to be exactly the same. Once you select the actual template, certain information is pre-populated, and it's your common information, so it's going to look different for every single company.”
“Within Aspire, we have two different types of estimates or opportunities,” McComas says. “One's going to be a contract, or your recurring services. And then the other is going to be a work order, and those are your one-time jobs.”
Both Contracts and Work orders offer a three-level hierarchy for customization:
The invoice types for Contracts are:
The invoice types for Work orders are:
“The main difference between the contract and the work order is that the invoice types will be different,” and they each trigger Aspire Software’s invoicing assistant at different stages, McComas explains. “And in a work order, I’m not going to have an occurrence column.”
For instance, a contract for recurring services like lawn mowing can be set up in the estimate on a fixed payment schedule.
→ In regions that stay warm throughout the year, you might write the estimate as a $12,000 annual contract, with scheduled weekly visits and a fixed $1,000 payment due each month, no matter how many times you actually mow.
→ An estimate for a work order, such as a one-time plant installation, details the time and material involved per service and triggers the invoicing assistant when the individual service is complete.
McComas says Aspire Software is a complete business management system that helps to automate and pre-populate contract estimates with common services and the:
“That invoice type is important because that informs how it gets through the invoicing assistant,” McComas says. “You're selecting that at the opportunity level with your estimating, and it can be part of the template that you've set up.”
Aspire Software includes a cost catalog powered by its integration with SiteOne Landscape Supply, which updates pricing nightly for commonly used landscape materials.
→The frequent updates ensure that contractors have an accurate view of their material costs.
In addition to SiteOne, landscape contractors can add material pricing from other nurseries or vendors to their specific cost catalog, McComas says.
The Aspire platform allows you to customize templates for specific types of work, combining:
You can also create kits that combine your company’s production factors with labor and material or supply costs into a single item on the estimate.
“We work off of the multiple overhead recovery system,” McComas says, allowing contractors to customize their markups and grow their profit margins.
In addition to direct costs for materials like fertilizer or weed killer, landscape markups typically include indirect overhead costs, such as:
Aspire automatically factors estimates with the margins and markups you’ve established for direct costs:
The software acts as a safeguard to ensure profitability in every job bid.
The system also accommodates custom, management-approved margins and markups by branch, division, or service type.
And unlike other estimating software on the market, Aspire also allows you to include a per-service or time-and-material-service within a fixed-payment contract.
“That’s important when you think of things like snow for our clients. They might have their shoveling as a fixed payment, but they want their salt as a per-service,” McComas says.
“Once the client signs off on the estimate, we become what we consider a work ticket management system,” McComas says.
An example work ticket might include 44 tickets for weekly turf maintenance, and Aspire provides a granular view of your team’s performance and materials used each week.
→ Rather than waiting until the end of the contract to determine whether you made a profit on the maintenance job, you can monitor the status weekly and adjust if needed.
It also helps improve communication with crew leaders and their teams.
“Their crew is going to see how many hours they have to actually perform that work. So you're really setting this estimate up to drive the rest of the system,” McComas says.
Any materials included in a contract estimate or work order estimate automatically appear in Aspire Software’s purchasing assistant, which shows landscapers a list of materials they need to buy. This feature helps landscapers:
“The opportunity estimate, it's driving everything else. You no longer have to worry, ‘Hey, I've done this estimate, I sent it to the client, and they signed off on it. But I forgot to tell my production team. I set it on their desk, and it's gone, and now the client's wondering when it's going to get done.’
“Instead, that work ticket is on the schedule board queue for the production manager as soon as the client signs off. The same with the purchasing of the materials and your job costing. All of those materials from that estimate went directly into my purchasing assistant, so I didn't have to worry about, ‘what did I put in that estimate?’ It's there, it's my grocery store list, it's ready to go,” McComas says.
With customizable reporting dashboards within Aspire Business Management Software, you can easily:
✔ Pull job-costing information
✔ Track unpaid invoices
✔ Monitor sales closing ratios
✔ Follow up on your prospect pipeline
✔ Keep tabs on gross profit margin
✔ Know how fast you get estimates to new customers
Free estimate forms for landscaping may seem cost-effective, but you‘re probably leaving money on the table if you‘re just guesstimating the costs.
By knowing all of your costs (in the office and the field) and planning for inflationary price hikes (not to mention the ongoing labor shortage), landscape business software can help eliminate workflow inefficiencies and boost the bottom line.
For landscape business owners, using Aspire means they can spend less time correcting mistakes and focus on taking advantage of our streamlined workflows and business efficiencies to beat out competitors and grow more revenue.
Want to see how Aspire’s Business Management Software works to streamline landscape business operations? Request a demo today!
