Your office is a truck
A landscaping day starts at the yard and ends who knows where. Rain moves Tuesday to Thursday. A crew finishes early, or a mower breaks. Then you spend Friday trying to work out from memory who worked how long, while the season's short and every hour counts.
The day's plan, on every phone
Build the week by crew and by job. Everyone sees where they're going and who they're with, right on their phone. When rain shuts things down at 6 a.m., change the shifts and send an update, and nobody drives to the yard for nothing.
Save the regular route as a template and copy it forward each week. A crew's Monday route rarely changes much.
Tracking hours from anywhere
Field work doesn't suit a strict location rule, because crews move around. Here's what tends to work:
- Record location instead of requiring it. People can clock in wherever they are, and you can look at where they were if a question comes up.
- Add your yard as a location. Crews who start there can use the yard's circle, or a tablet kiosk in the shop.
- Don't worry about signal. A punch made with no connection is saved with its real time and sent when the phone reconnects. Flags show which ones came in late.
Use jobs on the time clock if you want to see how hours split across properties.
Paid time gets tricky in the field
Under federal rules, travel between job sites during the workday is generally paid time. Waiting at the yard after you've told people to arrive usually is too. Getting this wrong across a crew for a whole season adds up. Have a clear rule on when the clock starts, and put it in writing. The Department of Labor's fact sheet is short and worth reading. So is our guide to overtime mistakes.
During peak season, the "Heading into overtime" list helps you see who's about to cross 40 hours, so you can move work around or plan for the cost.
Proof of the work
A customer says the crew skipped their property last week. Now you've got an answer. Build a simple job checklist:
- Property name
- What was done
- A photo, before and after if it matters
- Any problems, such as a broken sprinkler head or a dog in the yard
It takes the crew lead a minute. You can pull it up when the customer calls, and those photos are also good for your own marketing, with the customer's permission.
Equipment and safety
Mowers, trimmers, trailers and chemicals can do real damage. A daily walk-around form makes sure someone looks at the trailer hitch. A maintenance board keeps track of what's broken and who's fixing it. And a short course on equipment safety, with a quiz, means every new seasonal hire gets the same talk, not whatever you remembered that morning.
If you apply pesticides, track licenses as documents with an expiry date. A driver's license for anyone pulling a trailer belongs there too.
Seasonal crews
Every spring, you're hiring and retraining. Post your jobs on your own careers page, collect applications from phones and track them through interview and offer. New people get an onboarding pack on their first sign-in.
At the end of the season, archive people. They lose access, you keep their records, and you don't pay for them. Next spring, restore the ones coming back.
Language
Many crews work in more than one language. The best thing you can do for safety training is to record it in the language your crew actually speaks, in your own words. Short videos on a phone make that easy, and voice messages in chat suit people who'd rather not type.
What we don't do
We aren't field service software: there's no route optimization, no customer invoicing and no quotes. We handle your people. Keep your existing tool for customers and billing. Automatic clock-in works with the iPhone app. We don't have an Android release yet, though Android phones can use the web app in a browser.
What it costs
A crew of up to 10 at 1 location can use it for free. A 25-person company pays $14.50 a month for schedules, the clock and forms on Basic, billed yearly. Add Communications for chat at $29.00 in total.