Lawn Care Business Job Costing | Make or Break Your Business

Lawn care business job costing can be complicated, tying together all the factors that affect your bottom line  is critical for success.  As a lawn care business owner, almost every job will come with a number of costs: raw materials, plants, fertilizers, labor, and more. The practice of evaluating and estimating the costs of a job--before the job is completed--is known as job costing.

Lawn care business job costing comes with a number of powerful benefits. In this article we will look at a number of benefits of lawn care business job costing, and how they can make or break your business.

Lawn Care Revenue And Profit Projections.

Job costing will let you better predict the revenue and profit in any month, quarter or year. The costs that go into any job--materials, labor and the like--are a major factor in how much profit you will make. Although projects can run into cost overruns or go under-budget, lawn care business job costing can still help with short-term projections on longer projects that are expected to run several months.

Job Costing Minimize costs.

Job costing can help you minimize costs by letting you know costs ahead of time. Most lawn care businesses buy supplies either in advance (i.e. for the quarter or year) or whenever the job requires it. By doing job costing, you can anticipate your costs far in advance, letting you buy just what you need for the jobs you have planned for the coming months. This in turn will minimize your costs, and improve profit, by reducing the amount of money you waste on supplies you never use.

Lawn Care Business Job Costing = Better Reporting.

Job costing can also help your business by improving your reporting. Job costing demands that you calculate all costs before starting on a job. This means that you will have an idea of what the costs will be even if some inputs aren’t accounted for during completion of the job. So, in the event that you lose your financial records generated during a job, you can fall back on your job costing documents as another source of financial data.

Business Improved Productivity.

Job costing can improve your productivity by helping you prepare for each job better. In the course of job costing, you will naturally need to do an inventory of key job tasks: purchases; transportation; labor, etc. By knowing all of this beforehand, you will be able to plan out your jobs far in advance, improving efficiency by having all contingencies accounted for before the job is complete. This will in turn improve productivity, since you will have the job planned out in advance and be able to complete it in a timely fashion, with few unexpected challenges upsetting your schedule.

Job Costing = Better Pricing.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, job costing will help you quote more accurate prices to your clients. The proper price of a job depends largely on the cost. If you quote a client a price, then find out that the costs will be higher than anticipated, there will be an awkward moment where you’ll tell the client there has been a budget overrun and you’ll need more money to complete the job. Job costing helps you avoid such situations by giving you an accurate assessment of job costs up-front.

It’s clear that job costing can help you save money at your business and increase your profits.

The question is, how do you get started with job costing if you haven’t done so already?

Or, if you already are doing job costing, how can you improve your efforts

One great way to do job costing at your business is with Arborgold, the complete CRM suite for lawn care service businesses.

Arborgold comes with a number of great features to make job costing easier, faster and more intuitive:

• Resource management software tools. Provides a number of great features for inventory/employee/equipment tracking, letting you project maintenance costs, direct revenues, indirect costs, direct hourly costs and more.
• Service package bundles, which let you compile several services into one, allowing you to easily perform job costing (with the resource management tools) then compile the total cost using data in the service package outline.
• Proposal software, including upsell features, that helps you get a clear picture of exactly what your client wants done before work starts, so you know exactly what costs will be incurred right out of the gate.

Arborgold has the power to make your job costing easier, more accurate and more efficient. You’ll have at your fingertips all the tools you need to accurately project the costs of each and every job, letting you get every job done on-time and on-budget. This can result in a better, more productive, more profitable business.

Click here to learn more about Arborgold and how it can transform the way you work.