5 Best Ways to Track Landscaping Tools & Equipment

As a landscaping company, tracking landscaping tools and equipment inventory is important. It helps you keep your physical assets accounted for. For most landscaping companies, the largest expense you will incur, outside of your staff, is the equipment you use, especially large equipment. These investments should be monitored to ensure they are being used properly, returned on time, coming back without damage, and safe to use on the next job.

As a landscaping company, your employees are a huge part of your success as a business. When they lack the tools to get a job done safely and efficiently, it costs time, money, and sometimes the health or wellbeing of the worker. Throughout the course of a job, your employees use multiple tools each. Sometimes 3 or 4 pieces of equipment might be used on a single job, and as you add new employees to your team, the number of pieces of equipment being used multiplies. This is where companies find tools being lost, misplaced, mislabeled, returned damaged, or worse.

As a specialist in landscaping and landscaping business management, Arbogold understands the importance of tracking landscaping tools better than most. To help our clients monitor equipment and maintain investments, we offer bespoke software which includes the ability to track landscaping tools.

Below, we will talk about the 5 best methods of tracking landscaping tools and why they work.

1. Creating a Schedule for Tracking Landscaping Tools

The first and simplest method of tracking landscaping tools involves the creation of a schedule. This schedule should have a list of all equipment eligible for use. A new schedule should be created daily, with:

• The time a tool is checked out
• The job the tool is being used for
• The name of the employee checking out the tool
• Fuel levels during checkout if applicable
• The time it is checked back in
• Fuel levels during check-in if applicable

Of course, creating, enforcing, and monitoring these schedules takes time and resources away from other tasks you could be doing in the office. To keep it running smoothly and ensure the schedule is doing its job, it needs to be kept up and signed by management daily. It is also good practice to store the pages for later review if necessary.

2. Combination Schedules for Employees and Tools

Another way to stay on top of tracking landscaping tools is by assigning individual tools to individual employees. Giving each tool a unique barcode number, and each employee an employment code allows you to link the two together. This creates accountability to every piece of equipment in your shop because every employee is linked to certain tools.

In larger landscaping businesses, there may be a need to share one tool between two employees, or for an employee to have multiple tools assigned to them. If each tool is linked to one or more employees, it is easy to find who used it last and what went wrong should the tool wind up lost or damaged. It also helps your employees access tools as they are needed because they will always know who had it last.

3. Use a Software Program

The world has been digital for a long time, and it is not surprising to see why. The digitization of otherwise manual tasks, like schedule creation and management, cuts time and costs in half when it comes to tracking landscaping tools. Tracking software provides an assortment of amazing features and benefits to business owners, including:

• GPS Tracking – At Arborgold, our unique resource management software is designed for tracking landscaping tools and the employees who use them. The GPS protocols used in our system, let you see where your employees are, which equipment they are using, and when the equipment is due back. This is essential to large scale landscaping firms with multiple employees and tools.
• Real-Time Communication – It is not always enough to know where your employees and tools are, it is also important to be able to communicate with them. For example, if one employee is using a ride-on mower in one location and another client requires it, you can easily communicate that to the employee with the mower, and ensure it is delivered in real-time and with a prompt response.
• Up to Date List of Available Assets – Along with all the special features it offers, our software program also provides you with numbers for asset availability. This shows you what you have left to work with in the warehouse and for how long.
• Up to Date List of Assets on Location – Similar to asset availability, the software also provides a list of tools that are on job sites. This should tell you when each item is due back or how long it has been gone.

4. Set Equipment Reminders

Whether you choose to do it manually or indulge in the many features of your new landscaping software, setting equipment reminders will help with tracking landscaping tools. When an item has been gone for an extended period of time, reminders will alert not only you as management but the team using the equipment that it is time to either return the tools or provide you with an update.

5. Take the Arborgold Software Tour

There are many types of equipment tracking software on the market, but none of them have the same experience in the landscaping industry that we do. As an authority in the field of landscaping, snow removal, and plant health, we know more about this industry than generalized tracker software does. This gives you access to special features designed specifically for the individual needs of a landscaping firm, rather than picking and choosing which features you need from a standard business software package.

Arborgold is passionate about helping the world grow, and much of that growth happens right here at home. Looking for more information on the best landscaping tool and equipment trackers? We invite you to take an Arborgold tour!