Increase your profitability with a landscape estimating app

When it comes to landscaping estimates, guesswork can result in less-than-profitable revenue, ultimately inhibiting the growth of your landscaping company.

Landscape contractors want to win more landscaping jobs, but basing estimates solely on instinct, past job results, or assumptions about the current market can lead to a significant loss in profit. Unfortunately, it’s a frequent occurrence. Most companies underestimate their job costs by at least 1%. Combined with underestimating labor per hour by only 50 cents, that translates into $48,000 in lost revenue for a $3 million landscaping company.

Using a landscape estimate app to create accurate estimates based on your company’s standards and real-time data enables you to streamline the estimation process and provide consistent, profitable estimates so your landscaping business grows and thrives.

A landscaping estimate app like Aspire helps your landscape design or lawn care business:

• Create consistent landscaping estimates.
• Simplify complicated estimates.
• Capture upsell opportunities.
• Increase company profit margins.
• Gain visibility for future estimates.

Reasons for unprofitable landscaping estimates

Let’s be honest: Reasons abound as to why landscaping jobs lose money. Creating estimates on paper gives more room for error, especially if more than one person at your landscaping company writes estimates. Without a centralized business software system, inaccurate and unprofitable estimates often result from:

• Shortage of time.
• Erroneous or repetitive manual calculations.
• Inaccurate labor and materials costs.
• Inconsistent proposals.
• Lack of visibility into costs of past landscaping projects.

Landscaping estimate software simplifies the process so your small business can create all types of estimates quickly and profitably. And not only that, it streamlines your entire operations from the office to the field. Here’s a look at how Aspire’s landscape estimating software features improve estimates for landscaping services.

Create consistent landscaping estimates

Landscaping estimate software ensures your entire team possesses access to the same information, which is crucial for creating consistent estimates.

Aspire Landscape simplifies the process by eliminating the need to start from scratch. with pre-built templates, you can combine commonly used services, pricing, and language for estimating specific types of work. You can even create and customize kits, such as a mulch kit, for example, which combine your company’s production factors with labor and material costs into a single item on the estimate.

Customizing templates to fit your business means you can easily create consistent estimates, no matter if it’s an annual maintenance agreement or a complicated construction job. Plus, templates ensure you don’t forget to input important details affecting your total price.

Learn more about how Aspire business management software can give you better real-time insights into your data, allow you to make more informed decisions, and help increase profitability. Request a free demo today.

Simplify complicated estimates

You know how long it takes your crew to cut lawns with a 52-inch mower deck, but what about accounting for a steep slope that adds more labor time to the job?

With Aspire Landscape, it takes just a click of a button to adjust complexity, which increases labor hours for a particular portion of a job. Since there’s no limit to template complexity or number of production-rate kits you can build, you can develop a system that makes sense for your company, and simplify the estimate process at the same time.

Unlike a single-feature landscape estimating software or simple landscape calculator, Aspire offers landscape professionals end-to-end functionality. This means your company’s estimating, scheduling, purchasing, invoicing, job costing, timesheets, crew mobile app, and other business functions all remain in one place, increasing workflow efficiency for your entire team.

Capture upsell opportunities

Don’t miss out on the chance to add enhancements or extra services to your landscaping jobs. After you create your estimate, the ability to add optional services enables you to easily roll in an additional service, such as seasonal clean-up, into your total price. This means landscaping technicians or account owners can add enhancement proposals or tag-on services right on the spot.

Give homeowners or commercial clients the transparency they want with professional estimates customized for your company. Save time and gain faster approval by accepting customer signatures electronically via email, an online client portal, or from your Android tablet or iPad in the field.

Once a customer approves the job and you mark the estimate as sold, all the details carry over from the estimate to a work order, streamlining scheduling for the project. If the customer decides to make changes in the middle of the project, Aspire allows you to easily submit change orders and stay on track through every phase of the job.

Increase company profit margins

Protect your landscape company’s profit by establishing custom, management-approved margins and markups in your estimates. In Aspire Landscape, you can set margins and markups for labor, materials, subcontractors, and other direct costs, which automatically factor into your estimates.

For maximum flexibility, you can create pricing overrides on estimates within preset limits, or create rules that send estimates over a certain dollar amount to a supervisor for approval. This gives your sales team a competitive advantage while ensuring your company doesn’t provide customers estimates that diminish your company’s profit.

Gain visibility for future estimates

No matter the job—whether seasonal maintenance, irrigation installation, or a hardscape project—Aspire business management software gives your company full visibility into granular job data. The ability to see real-time costs and which jobs generate the most profit allows your company to monitor and adjust as needed so your company can grow.

As labor contributes a significant portion to job cost, time tracking remains a key factor. Aspire's Crew Mobile time-tracking app, downloaded from the Apple App Store or Google Play, allows your employees to clock in or out from any Android or iOS smartphone or tablet.

Information about every aspect of a job, including how long it takes your crew to prepare a site and perform work, gives you better insight and more accurate numbers for future project estimates. As you analyze your company's performance, this enables you to develop effective strategies for company growth.