St. Paul weather update: After 4 inches of snow earlier this week, the forecast calls for highs in the 70s this weekend. It’s time to break out the shorts because spring has finally sprung!
It also means lawn care season has finally arrived. And if you’re still managing your lawn care business using paper processes, you’re probably feeling overwhelmed by the amount of work that goes into managing a multitude of maintenance contracts. Determining when to service a property, what services to perform, and tracking those services throughout the year can be a chore.
That’s why many lawn care businesses have turned to lawn care software to better manage their contractual obligations. With software tracking your activity, you can get better insight into your business and work on improving your business instead of working in it.
So what should you look for when shopping for lawn care software? Here are three tips:
Contract Management Functionality – Lawn maintenance contracts, by their nature, are difficult to manage. You’ve got multiple services performed at varying intervals throughout the year. Tracking where you are against your contractual obligations can be difficult. And, honestly, this is where most lawn care software fails.
So when you’re shopping for software, ask how it manages contracts. Can you setup your contracts in advance? Can you easily create maintenance programs with multiple services, simplifying contract creation? How does it manage services – like fertilizing – with a defined frequency? Will it schedule those services automatically the correct number of days apart?
Another important consideration is renewing contracts. Does the software make it easy to create a similar contract the following year? Do you have to setup a new contract every year? You can save a lot of time at contract renewal by having the ability to quickly setup your contracts.
Scheduling Flexibility – If you’ve contracted with a commercial property owner to mow the lawn 3 times in April, 4 in May, 5 in June, 5 in July, 5 in August, 4 in September and 3 in October, that’s 29 visits over the course of the summer. Your lawn care software should make it easy for you to schedule those 29 visits. And it should give you the flexibility to schedule the entire contract all-at-once or put your contract work into a pending file so you can schedule on a bi-weekly or monthly basis.
And, optimally, it should give you flexibility to quickly reschedule when rain days force you to shuffle your schedule. You don’t want to waste time doing something as simple as shifting your schedule because of a rain out.
Reporting – There are two key things that are important to understand when managing your maintenance work:
- How are you progressing against your contractual obligations? The key to keeping your customers happy is making sure you’re meeting your contractual obligations. If you don’t, you run the risk of pissing off your customers and losing your contracts. Performing services too frequently can cost you money. So make sure your software can tell you, for instance, that you have performed 25 of your 35 contracted mowing services.
- How are you doing financially? Your lawn care software should be able to tell you what you budgeted for your contracts and what your actual receipts are so you can see how your budgeted income compares to your actual income, and plan business expenses accordingly.
There’s a lot more to lawn care software than just these three items, but by enabling you to manage your contracts, schedule your maintenance work and report on how you’re doing, the lawn care software you select will help you better manage and understand your business.