Guide to Choosing the Best Lawn Care Business Software

As you know, running and building a lawn care business is more than just showing up at a client’s home once a week to mow their grass. There are many moving parts that go into running a successful lawn care business.

You have to find new clients, keep existing clients, schedule appointments, assign tasks, schedule follow-ups, create invoices that accurately reflect job tasks completed and collect payments. With so many components that go into operating a lawn care business, you will need an application that will be able to control each of these areas.

What is Lawn Care Business Software?

Lawn care business software will be a centralized application on your computer, tablet, or smartphone that will allow you to view all components of running a successful lawn care business. Lawn care business software may have a corresponding mobile device application that will update in real-time so that employees in the field can view and edit the job while on-the-go with no delay.

Must-Have Features of Lawn Care Business Software

Lawn care business software may include any or all of the following features:

Calendar Synchronization

This feature allows all calendars to be synchronized within the application and updated on a real-time basis. This feature is incredibly useful when you have multiple crews running accounts. Keeping crews on tract to complete their daily accounts is very important to the success of your lawn care business.

Account Organizer

Similar to calendar synchronization is the account organizer. A job organizer will organize the jobs on the schedule in a variety of ways. For example, Sagenine lawn care software allows the scheduled jobs to be organized based on location, crew, and type of job.

Rather than organizing a job based on one feature, the software takes all the components that go into scheduling the job to decide the best method of efficiency for each job.

Follow-Up Appointments

Some lawn maintenance accounts on the schedule may be a follow-up appointment from an original job. These appointments may need to be looked at and treated differently. Lawn care business software may include a section specially designed for follow-up appointments.

Accounting Software Integration

To be successful in any business, you need to get paid! Most accounting software includes an invoice generator that will allow you to create invoices for jobs you complete, but you may want a centralized location where you can look at all the components related to the lawn care business in one place.

Automated Email Reminders

Another feature that should be included in your lawn care business software is the automated reminder feature. Automated reminders are a reminder email, text, or phone call that will be sent to the customer 24 hours before the time of the appointment.

Automated reminders are a way for the customer to confirm, cancel, or reschedule their upcoming appointment. This feature allows you to schedule a job in its place if a customer cancels their appointment.

Choosing the Best Lawn Care Business Software

Now that you know some of the features to look for with lawn care business software, it’s time to choose the best. When looking at the features that are included with lawn care business software, this guide will help you choose the best for your business.

Prioritize the Features

Take some time to study the features offered with the best lawn care business software and prioritize them.

What is the most important feature you want the lawn care business software to have?

When you know the most important feature you are looking for, you will be able to weed out some of the software from the get-go.

If the software you are looking at does not have the feature that is the most important to you, then do not include it on your list of considerations.

Ask Questions

If you are unsure of the features that may be most important to you, then you should ask yourself important questions. Ask yourself, “What feature is the most important to my business? What can my business best benefit from? What is my current software lacking?” Answering these questions will help you decide which features are important to you and which you can live without.

Return on Investment

As a business owner, you know that if you aren’t receiving a return on your investment, then it isn’t worth it. A return on investment is the ratio between the profit made and the cost of the investment.

In regards to lawn care business software, the return on the investment will only be worth it if the cost of the investment (the software) will help generate a profit.

Successful lawn care business software will help the overall performance, efficiency, and production of the business. If the software is slowing down the production, efficiency, and performance of the company, the return will not be worth the investment.

Also, have a deep look at price. Most software in the market will be a monthly charge. But, you need to look deep into the packages. Some companies advertise a low monthly price, but the cost is increase IF you add users.

It's therefore important to choose your lawn care business software that charges an easy to understand monthly fee.

Ease Of Use

If the lawn care business software is easy to use, it should contribute to the overall return on investment. Software that is easy to use will be less likely to slow production, performance, and efficiency of the business.

Software that is easy to use also requires less time to learn. This means less downtime learning new software and more time completely jobs to collect payment.

Conclusion

When choosing the best lawn care business software, the first step you need to complete is looking at all of the features the software has to offer. Once you take an inventory of the features that are available, you should prioritize them in order of what you need the software to achieve most of all. Knowing the main feature, you want the software to possess will allow you to look at the software that has those features.

When you have narrowed to software down, you need to look at how much the software costs and how easy or difficult the software will be to learn. Downtime learning software can be detrimental in running a business. Essentially, you need to spend less time learning software and more time performing jobs and invoicing them.

To choose the best lawn care business software for your business, you should find software that has the exact features you need with the quickest learning-curve time possible.