Best Job Costing Software for Landscape Businesses – Factors You Should Consider
What Matters (and What Doesn’t) for Landscapers Who Want to Make More Money
Let’s skip the buzzwords. If you’re looking for job costing software, it comes down to five things:
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Is it easy to implement?
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Will your team actually use it?
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Does it make or save you real money?
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How much time does it waste entering data?
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And—most importantly—how accurate is it?
We’ve talked to hundreds of landscapers, and they all run into the same problems. Here’s what to look for.
Implementation and adoption
If It’s a Pain to Set Up, It’s a Waste of Your Time
A lot of software installs die during implementation. It’s too complicated, too disconnected, solves a problem you don’t have, or creates new ones. And, if your crew sees it as “extra work,” forget about it.
If you can’t make the software part of your day-to-day workflow, it’s not going to help your business. Period. You need something that doesn’t change your daily operations.
Good software should make the job easier. Not harder. Not slower. And if your team can’t get value from it without jumping through hoops? It’s not worth the money.
ROI: Return on your investment
Job Costing Software Should Make You More Money. End of Story.
If you’re breaking even on your software—spending $200/month to “save” $200/month—it’s not working. Job costing tools should do one thing really well:
Help you price jobs right so you actually make money.
You should:
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Win more jobs because your pricing is sharp
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Boost profit on every job because nothing gets missed
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Spend less time manually building bids or chasing costs
That fuels growth.
Ease of use and training
If It Takes a Week of Training, It’s Already Failing
We’ve seen landscapers ditch CRMs and ERPs because the job costing tools are buried under 10 menus and 20 training videos. That’s a nightmare in an industry with high turnover. If your team needs a certification to pull job cost reports, that’s a red flag.
Software should feel like a tool, not a burden. If it’s too complex, it won’t get adopted. And if it’s not adopted, it can’t help you make better business decisions.
The right system should be usable starting on day one. Beware of systems that talk of rollout plans, soft launches, and training “phases”. Those are all code for complicated.
Amount of data entry required
Garbage In, Garbage Out
Most job costing software still relies on manual inputs—someone has to key in labor hours, fuel, equipment time, material use, etc. And if they are off by a little? Your margins suffer.
Manual entry takes time, and introduces errors.
That’s why most landscapers default to the good ol’ “labor + 30% for overhead” method. It’s not great—but it’s better than wasting hours on spreadsheets and still getting bad data. The problem is: that 30% guesstimate is wrong.
There’s a better way
Stop Guessing. Track What Actually Happens.
Most landscapers who come to Momentum are dealing with one (or more) of these five issues:
1) You’re Missing Profit Because You Can’t Track True Job Costs
You probably already know your fixed overhead. Rent, admin wages, insurance—they’re predictable.
But variable costs? That’s where profits vanish:
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Fuel
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Vehicle wear and tear
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Crew travel time
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On-site labor
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Equipment use
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Subcontractor costs
- Materials
These change on every job. You can’t track them accurately by hand—and no traditional software system can either.
Momentum solves this with real-time job site data. Our GPS trackers and connected devices automatically track:
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Vehicle movement
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Equipment use
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Crew activity
Then we convert that into dollars and cents. No guestimates. No spreadsheets. No data entry.
2) You’re Overbidding—and Losing Work
When you bid too high, potential customers walk. They’ll go find a “better deal.” And if you don’t win jobs, there’s zero revenue coming in.
But here’s what’s interesting, winning the wrong jobs at the wrong price is worse than not winning it at all. Now you’re losing money. Read about an analysis of thousands of jobs in our blog.
When you don’t know your true job costs, you’re flying blind. You either overbid and lose the job, or underbid and lose your margins. Both are bad for business.
With Momentum, you can bid on a renewal with confidence. Our GPS trackers pull real data from your vehicles, equipment, and labor activity. You’ll see down to the dollar what each job is really costing you. That’s a big reason the owner of U.S. Lawn’s highest revenue franchises chose Momentum – read the Press Release.
You can even “play with the numbers” to update bid amounts so you can see where you have to be to hit those profit targets
3) You’re Underbidding – and Working for Free
Underbidding might win you the job—but if you’re not covering all your costs, you’re just staying busy, not profitable.
This is where a lot of landscapers lose margin without realizing it. They win the work, but hidden variable costs—fuel, labor, equipment use, materials—eat away the profit.
We’ve analyzed thousands of jobs and found that variable costs can account for 10–30% of total job cost. When your average margin is 8–12%, that’s a serious problem.
That’s why Momentum tracks real field activity. You’ll see what each job actually costs you, and how much to charge to hit your profit goals.
4) You Can’t Easily Compare Estimated vs Actual Costs
Tracking estimated vs actual job costs is a time-sucking nightmare for software-only job costing users. You’re pulling numbers from Excel sheets, GPS apps, time trackers, whiteboards, CRMs… and trying to line them all up.
It’s slow. It’s manual. And half the time, the data’s off.
If it takes hours to figure out whether a job made money. Most people won’t bother and they will wait until the end of the year to see if “everything worked out”.
Momentum fixes that. Vehicle use, labor time, equipment run-time, and more are translated into job costs in real time. You always have a clean, accurate comparison of your estimated vs actual costs. On every job.
Below you can see what the per-job estimated vs actual cost breakdown looks like in the Momentum app. All of the data is populated and calculated automatically.
You Don’t Know Which Customers Are Making You Money
If your business wasn’t profitable overall, you’d know. But what most owners miss is which customers are actually driving that profit—and which ones are just keeping the crew busy.
It comes down to job costs per customer. In most landscaping businesses, a handful of accounts deliver all the profit, while others barely break even—or (shudder) lose money.
Momentum shows you exactly where each customer stands. You’ll see profit margins job by job, customer by customer. And once you see it, you can take action—adjust pricing, renegotiate, or drop the dead weight.
Lucas with Pacific Landscaping was winning every bid using Overhead per Hour, but his profit margins were razor thin. He was busy – just not making money. Using Momentum, Lucas was able to see that 14% of his jobs weren’t profitable. He adjusted his plans, upped his prices at renewal time (with numbers to show why), and dropped the clients that weren’t worth it.
All of these issues—missed profit, bad bids, wasted time—have one thing in common: they don’t get solved by software-only systems. Why? Because those tools still depend on manual data entry using info you don’t actually have.
That’s why we built Momentum differently.
Most job costing software spreads overhead evenly across every job and calls it good. But not all jobs are created equal. A quick job five miles from your yard doesn’t cost the same as one across town. Travel time, fuel, wear-and-tear—they all vary. So why would your software treat them the same?
Because it’s not connected to reality.
Momentum is.
Try Momentum free for 30 days. Nothing to lose and so much to gain.
