Landscaping extra work not billed: the storm limbs cleared at the HOA entrance, missing from the month’s invoice

Four kinds of extra, and only two of them are a miss

Before counting anything, sort the work. Not every hour outside the routine is billable on its own, and treating it all the same either overbills the association or hides the real leak.

• In the specs. Some maintenance specs include a set number of irrigation checks, a stated allowance for minor repairs, or storm cleanup up to a limit. That work is in the monthly price. The miss here runs the other way: a spec item the crews stopped doing.
• Goodwill by decision. A shrub replaced for a board member before the annual meeting, a quick favor for a new property manager. A fair choice when the owner makes it, knows the cost and can see how often it happens on each property.
• Outside the specs, approved, never invoiced. The manager asked, the work was done, and the record never left the truck. This is the main leak, and storm cleanup, seasonal color swaps and tree work beyond the contract’s height limit sit here.
• Outside the specs, never approved. A resident asked, the crew obliged, and nobody with authority to spend the association’s money said yes. This one is a miss of a different kind: it cannot be billed after the fact without an argument, so its cost is the hours, and the fix is the routing rule.

Irrigation work adds a parts problem on top of the hours problem. A head or a valve fitted from the truck’s stock on a mow day is labor and material, and if the repair is outside the specs, both belong on a ticket. The plumbing trade has the same trap with truck stock that never reaches the ticket; the mechanism is identical.

The count: last month’s crew sheets against the invoices

This takes an afternoon for the five largest accounts, with records the company already has. Pick the most recent month that is fully invoiced; in a storm month, pick that one.

• Pull every crew leader’s daily sheets and timeclock entries for those five properties, plus the photos the crews took on site, with their timestamps.
• Add what the sheets miss: ask each crew leader and account manager to forward the texts and voicemails in which a manager or resident asked for something. Each request becomes a row.
• List the irrigation repairs and parts pulled from stock for the same properties and dates.
• For each row, open the specs for that property and mark it in the specs, goodwill by decision, outside and approved, or outside and never approved.
• For every row outside the specs, look for a matching invoice line or approved quote in the same month or the next. Count the unmatched rows and price them: crew-hours at the loaded hourly cost, plus parts and disposal, plus what the company would have charged had it quoted the work.

Illustrative example: across five properties in a month with one storm, the count finds 31 rows outside the routine. Nine are in the specs, four are goodwill the owner knew about, and 18 are outside the specs. Of those 18, six appear on an invoice, three were never approved by anyone with authority, and nine were approved and never billed — including 14 crew-hours of storm cleanup at one HOA. Those numbers are invented for the example, and the company’s own count could just as easily come back near zero. A property with no hours coded to it at all is itself a finding.

One EXTRA line on the daily sheet, and a Friday pass

The fix is one line, not a new system. Every crew leader’s daily sheet, paper or app, gets a line labeled EXTRA. When anything outside the routine happens on a property, the crew leader fills it in before leaving the site.

• Who asked, by name and role: the property manager, a board member, a resident.
• What was done, in the words of the specs where possible: “storm cleanup, entrance and main drive, limbs to 4 inches, chipped on site.”
• Crew-hours and the crew members, so payroll and the extra match.
• Parts and materials used, with the irrigation zone or the bed.
• A photo before and after, which also answers the question “was that in the contract?” later.

Then, every Friday, one person in the office takes the week’s EXTRA lines and gives each one a decision: a quote or a price sent to the property manager for approval, “covered by contract” with the spec line named, or $0 goodwill marked as the owner’s choice. Nothing stays undecided past Friday, and every approved extra goes onto that property’s next invoice. Construction subcontractors know the same leak as the time-and-materials tag that rides in a truck instead of reaching the pay application; the electrical guide on unsigned T&M tags covers that version, and the commercial cleaning guide covers the strip and wax done on a hallway request. The principle is the same in all three trades: the record of extra work has to reach billing on a schedule, not on someone’s memory.

Storm cleanup and the routing rule, agreed in advance

Storm cleanup is where the largest single extras happen and where the argument is hardest afterwards, because the crew did the work in the days when everyone wanted it done fast. Agree the terms before the season: whether cleanup is included up to a limit, the hourly crew rate and disposal charge beyond it, and who can approve it by text. When a storm hits, one list per property goes to the property manager within a few days, with the hours and the photos, while the cleanup is still in everyone’s memory.

The routing rule for residents works best when it is written down and handed to the manager, not improvised by the crew leader on a driveway. Requests from residents go to the association or the management company; the crew leader can be friendly and point to it; and if the association approves the work, the approval comes to the office in writing and becomes a quote. Whether a text or an email counts as approval under a given contract is a question for the company’s attorney; the EXTRA line records what was asked either way.

Talking to the property manager about extras

Billing every extra is not the goal; deciding every extra is. A manager who has received free storm cleanup for two seasons will notice the first invoice line, so the change goes better as a conversation than as a surprise. Lead with the standard, not the backlog: from next month, anything outside the specs gets a short written price before the crew starts, except storm cleanup under the terms already agreed, and anything in the specs stays in the monthly fee.

A property manager working to a board-approved budget has to explain every line to the board. A price before the work, with a photo after, makes that easier, not harder. The count also feeds the renewal: a property whose crews spend hours every month on requests outside the specs needs a scope conversation at renewal, with the numbers in hand. What to do about past extras that were never billed is the owner’s decision, and whether they can be billed at all depends on the contract and on what was agreed at the time.

When this is not worth paying anyone for

The count and the EXTRA line are built to run in-house, and for a company whose crews already code hours to properties they should be. A company with a handful of properties, where the owner takes every request personally, can check its extras by eye. If the count comes back with nothing outside the specs unbilled, the routine is already working; keep it.

An outside review earns its fee when extras are one leak among several and the records are too scattered to connect in an afternoon: hours coded to crews instead of properties, renewals at the bid price, enhancement proposals with no outcome, invoices waiting out the season. Our Revenue Review takes two weeks. It works from read-only access to the company’s crew sheets, timeclock export, specs and invoices, and prices each leak as a monthly dollar figure where the records support one. It contacts no property manager or resident, walks no property, inspects no work and gives no legal advice. Nobody here runs a landscaping company, and there are no client case studies on this site yet. For what a landscaping business consultant engagement with us covers, see the commercial landscaping page.

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.