Landscaping and Lawn Care QuickBooks Cleanupand the hours that need a yard
If every wage sits in one pile, a hard yard and an easy yard look like the same idea.
See the hours
Two people all day, or one person before lunch
Job profit on a lawn route is mostly time. Materials matter, and a palm full of fertilizer is real, but the spread between a good stop and a bad one is usually how long the crew stayed. If wages never touch the yard, you are pricing from memory. Memory favors the stops you enjoy and forgets the ones with the gate code that never works.
A lunch line near the shop can swallow an hour before the plate arrives. Time has a cost even when the work feels ordinary. Crew hours should carry the yards they mowed. The drive between stops, and the evening you spend quoting, can stay overhead because they are not one customer's lawn. The labor on a specific yard should be readable against that yard.
You do not need a factory system to do this. A simple split is enough. Who was on the truck, which stops they finished, and whether a job ran long because of a cleanup the quote never mentioned. The point is not to shame a slow day. The point is to see it before you copy last year's price onto a yard that took twice as long.
Overhead that is truly overhead should stay there. The owner's time shopping for a mower is not a customer's cost. Blades you burned through on one wooded lot might be. We will ask. A file that pushes every dollar of payroll onto jobs will make overhead look magically small and every yard look slightly worse, which is its own kind of lie.
Payday is set up, then it is yours to run
Payroll setup is part of the work. The state registrations, the company that will run payday, and the deposit dates are lined up before the first crew check. After that lineup, the run stays with that company. We step away from the payday itself. A lawn company that pays in cash from the console is not keeping anything simple. The hours, the tax deposits, and any chance of reading a yard all go missing.
Federal rules want overtime after forty hours in a workweek for people who are not exempt, and a day rate still has to cover the hours actually worked. Overtime after a long storm week is not optional just because the route was behind. This page names no dollar figure for an hour of labor. We set the file up so the hours exist, and the provider you chose can pay from them. How often a state requires a payday is a separate question, and it lives with the other state rules.
The week you hire the first employee is also a paperwork week, not only a payroll week. A solo route and a route with a crew are different files. The first hire means registrations, a deposit schedule, and hours that have to exist before anyone is paid. If nobody tells the file, you can run a season and discover the gap when a notice arrives. The route page and this page meet right there. What one state does to a solo mowing exclusion is written on the state page.
A lead who quotes and a crew that mows can be the same person on a small company. Split the day honestly enough that quoting does not vanish into a yard, and mowing does not vanish into "admin." When you are ready, the bank feed should be able to show the payroll leaving and the yards still making sense.
Tell us about the crew
Say how the week is staffed. Names can wait.
You will be talking to the Steven Palmieri practice.