Landscape job costing by property: which maintenance contracts take more crew-hours than they pay for

Landscape job costing by property from three exports

The first look needs no new software. It needs three sets of records the company already keeps, covering the same full months — the last complete season, or the last three months if a season is too much to start with.

• Hours paid: the payroll or timeclock export, with date, employee, crew and hours, plus any job or property code the timeclock captured.
• Where each crew was: the route sheets or schedules for those days, the crew leaders’ daily logs, and GPS stop times where the trucks carry a tracker. These turn “Crew 3, Tuesday, 38 hours” into hours on named properties.
• What each property was supposed to take, and what it paid: the bid or estimate behind each contract — hours per visit times visits per month — and the invoices for the same months.

Keep enhancements, irrigation repairs and other time-and-materials work on their own line, in hours and in revenue. Mixed into the maintenance hours, they make a property look better or worse than its maintenance contract really is.

Placing hours on properties when timesheets say crew and day

For each crew-day, list the properties on the route in order. Where GPS stop times or a crew leader’s log give arrival and departure times, the on-site hours are the time on site multiplied by the number of people on the crew. Where they do not, split the day’s on-site time by the bid hours of each stop and mark those rows as estimated, so nobody later mistakes them for measured hours.

Every paid hour then lands on one of four lines:

• On-site hours, by property.
• Drive time, by route — not spread across the stops. Spread evenly, it hides the property that sits far off the route.
• Shop, loading, fueling and weather hours, as the company’s own non-billable line.
• Unplaced hours: paid time that cannot be tied to any property or route. Their size is itself a finding, because it is the share of paid crew-hours the company cannot see.

Rank the five largest accounts by revenue per crew-hour

Start with the five largest maintenance contracts by monthly revenue, because a gap there moves the most money. For each, divide the season’s maintenance revenue by the season’s on-site crew-hours. Then set the bid’s hours beside the actual hours, and the company’s own loaded labor cost per hour — wages plus payroll taxes, workers’ compensation and benefits, from its own payroll — beside the revenue per hour.

Illustrative example: two HOA contracts at $3,000 a month each, both bid at 24 crew-hours a month, or $125 per crew-hour. Over the season, the first averages 22 hours a month on site — about $136 per crew-hour. The second averages 34 — about $88. Same invoice, same bid, and at a loaded labor cost of $40 an hour, the second property’s on-site labor alone takes about 45% of its fee before drive time, equipment and overhead. Every number in this example is invented; the company’s own figures are the only ones that matter.

There is no neutral public benchmark for revenue per crew-hour in landscape maintenance. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes wages, not contractor pricing: its median for landscaping and groundskeeping workers was $18.82 an hour in May 2025. That wage is one input to a loaded cost, not a price. The useful comparison is each property against its own bid, and against the company’s other properties, season over season.

What explains the gap, property by property

A property that runs past its bid is a question, not a verdict. Find the reason before deciding anything, because each reason has a different fix.

• Scope the bid missed: more beds and detail work, slopes, obstacles or hand-trimming than the production rates assumed. The fix is a renewal priced from the hours, with the hours as the stated reason.
• Work outside the specs done on request: a resident’s or a manager’s “while you’re here” with no ticket. The fix is a ticket and a quote for each extra, or the spec line it falls under.
• Specs that never reached the route sheet, so the crew does more — or less — than was sold.
• Callbacks and rework after complaints, which belong on their own count.
• The season, not the property. The Bureau of Labor Statistics notes that crews may be busier or work longer hours in spring, summer and fall; compare the same months across properties before blaming one of them.
• Drive time: a property far off the route whose price never carried the drive.

For each property the decision is one of four: reprice at renewal, re-scope the specs with the manager, ticket the extras, or re-route. Walking away from a contract is a fifth, and it is the owner’s call, made with the numbers in hand.

Keeping landscape job costing by property current every week

Once a season has been counted by hand, the fix is upstream: hours coded to the property they were spent on, at the time they are spent. Field software such as Aspire or LMN, and timeclock apps with job codes, can capture this when crews clock to a property and not just to a shift. Software that records hours by shift reports the same blind spot faster.

Then a fixed weekly check, about thirty minutes: the five largest properties, last week’s on-site hours against the bid’s weekly hours, and any property over by more than an agreed margin for a second week running goes to the owner with a reason attached. The threshold is the company’s choice. What matters is that someone looks every week, not at year-end close.

The same numbers feed the fall renewal. A renewal priced from the season’s actual hours on that property is a different conversation with a property manager than a round-number increase. For when those numbers need to be ready, see the guide on when HOA boards approve landscaping budgets.

When this is not worth paying anyone for

The count above is designed to be run in-house, and for a company whose crews already clock to properties it should take an afternoon. A company with a dozen properties and an owner who still runs the routes can see the problem accounts by eye. If the ranking comes back with every property near its bid, the bids are working; keep them.

An outside review earns its fee when hours by property are one gap among several and the records are too scattered to connect in an afternoon: timesheets with no property code, extras done with no ticket, renewals priced without hours, invoices waiting through the season. Our Revenue Review takes two weeks. It works from read-only access to the timeclock export, route sheets, crew leader logs, specs and invoices, and prices each gap as a monthly dollar figure where the records support one. It walks no property, contacts no manager or board, configures no software and moves no money. Nobody here runs a landscaping company, and there are no client case studies on this site yet. For how it compares with a coach or a peer group, see what a landscaping business consultant costs.

If it is unclear whether any of this is worth a fee, start with a free 20-minute call, where a company too small for the arithmetic is told so.