Create Your Lawn Care Invoice Template for NPOs Effortlessly

Lawn care invoice template for NPOs

me to wake up here you go hey everyone it's my candies and yet again i've been dragged out by my producers in the middle of the night to watch a mowing video today we're going to be talking about whether or not you should do contracts for your business but while you're listening we're going to have some commentary of this lawn being mode but i need you to guess how many minutes did it take to mow the grass okay so total minutes with two people so if it was 10 minutes for two people that would be 20 total minute now from last week's video you had to guess how much did it cost for the property to be mowed and the winner of that contest was matt sharkey so matt please email us below and you will win a massive package to lawncaremedia.com now today we are giving a lifetime access to landscapebusinesscourse.com it's worth 599 dollars you're gonna get free asks if you can just guess how much time it took to mow this grass in minutes whoever gets it first is the most accurate we'll get 599 package to landscape business course dot com without any further delay let's roll the tape and let's talk about contracts versus charging people by the cut when it comes to mowing grass all right so this is blake and he is on his phone because this is where we keep all of the data for our notes for our jobs and the reason that he's also on his phone is he's punching in we punch in and out of every single job the reason i actually know and my producers know exactly how long these jobs takes is because we punch in and out of every single job now i understand it's sometimes very difficult to get your crew to actually punch in and out of every single job so people like how do you get them to punch in and out accurately here's what you gotta do you gotta pay them by performance you gotta pay them by the budget hours and they got to realize that having accurate data allows you to raise prices on the customers that take them too long to mow consistently so when they understand that hey if we punched it out and we are consistently not able to hit budget hours guess what the boss is going to raise the price and by raising the price because of p4p you can check out more information on that p4psoftware.com training but because of p4p they basically get a raise every time that we increase the price to the customer which is fantastic for them and they want to make sure we have that accurate data so that's how you make sure they actually punch in and out so you get good punch in and punch out times but that's why he's looking at his phone he's not looking at his phone because of snapchat or because of tick tock and if he is well that's fine because again he's on p-4p it's up to him if he wants to take a little bit longer a drop totally up to him i don't really care he's not getting paid an hourly wage and by the way blake kicks butt all right so we're gonna roll with this crew here and we're going to be determining how long this job takes in minutes if you were just one person right so there are two of them but you got to multiply how many minutes you're thinking by two to get the total number of minutes for this job and again whoever gets the closest first is going to get a free membership to landscapebusinesscourse.com now while they're mowing this grass we're going to talk about contracts and whether or not you should charge contracts when it comes to mowing grass now i'm not against or for contracts but i'm going to explain some of my positions i feel like contracts are most useful in areas where the grass grows year round where you mow grass literally every single month of the year and maybe you have a month or two or you only mow it once or twice but you basically keep mowing year round that's where contracts in my opinion works okay because level billing makes a lot of sense now if you live in 60 70 percent of the climate where you have a couple months where you don't even mow the grass or potentially in five six months where you have snow it's icy it's super cold and no one needs their lawn mowed you probably don't want to charge contracts and here's why first and foremost when you have a contract that needs to get signed it adds another step to the sales process and yes you can do it digitally you can send it you can have it integrating your crm when they sign off on it we have the same thing but it adds another layer another step required in the sales process but that's not really a big deal i'm not too concerned about that because it's pretty easy with technology to get a signature definitely if you're doing things with paper do not do signed contracts because then you gotta go back to the customer's property like you're wasting a lot of time and money you're just adding friction that sales process and you're gonna it's gonna be harder to grow the business quickly now contracts are also really really good for cash flow because you get stable income throughout the whole year so what you could potentially do is maybe you don't want to grow a big business you just want to farm get the best customers you want that steady cash flow and you're not worried about massive growth and you're not worried about adding another step in the sales process well then contracts might be really good because you do get that nice stable cash flow throughout the entire year now the downfall the real downfall of contracts is the fact that for most of us we are seasonal a lot of our work is done in five to six months of the year and the other four three four months we might be a little bit slower it might not be as busy in terms of the number of cuts performed on the client's property so the problem the problem with this is if they cancel at the end of the growing season and as you go into the season when there's not as many cuts they cancel because if they do that you've actually performed a bunch of work in the very busy months and they they just don't want to pay and hey we're not we're done it's grass isn't growing we don't want to keep using your service and they stopped paying but the problem is because of level billing you actually didn't make any money for the growing season when you were going so consistently because when it comes to contracts and level billing you actually make your money in the months when you come less often that's when the profit is really being made you don't have to be there as much you don't have to beat it every single week you could literally do every other every other week or maybe once a month and during those months is actually when you can make all of your profit so the problem is this because everyone's like well that's fine they signed contract here's the thing i want you at when i ask you are you going to take someone to court over 120 per month contract and if you aren't if it's not going to hold up in court not only just from a legal standpoint making sure your contract is bulletproof like that's the first step you're gonna have to make sure it's actually gonna hold up in court but secondary are you really gonna go to court over 120 a month like literally the whole value of that entire uh contract over the course of 12 months is literally like 1400 and you're probably literally trying to get the last three four or five months of a contract we're talking like five six hundred dollars that you're going to court over because of this contract that they have several months left and then again you might lose on a good customer because they're like hey i might be selling my house next year or in six months and now you don't get that customer because you have this contract in place so these are all things to think about and then i know some people are like well if they cancel early you can tell them that you'll there will be a retroactive feed go backwards all of that is totally fine and understandable but i just am fearful for the people that want to grow really quickly and get more customers it's going to be a dampener on your growth and that's okay if you want to have higher profit margins but just grow slower contracts are great level billing is great it's great for cash flow you know exactly how much money is coming in every single month and it might be something you want to look into especially if you're in those growing areas where that you're able to cut grass literally year round but in a market like ours like this grass that you're looking at right now is being cut at the beginning of may it takes us almost twice as long that's a little bit of a hint by the way it almost takes us twice as long now compared to in the middle of june july august september when the grass isn't growing as fast so if i have to do level billing on these type of months where i literally take us twice as long we spend twice as long on the property well what if they sell the house what if they cancel what if they foreclose on the house and they leave like all of a sudden i'm stuck with having a a contract that i haven't actually got any profit on i did all the work for but i never got the profit and it's tough to go and tell a customer yeah you're canceling and you owe us 600 because you cancelled early like what if they don't pay well you say i'll just charge their credit card you can get a charge back so i'm not against contracts don't think that some people think based on what i just said there that i'm against contracts i'm against contracts if two things are true number one you're trying to grow very quickly and number two if you're in an area where you have a lot of seasonality like snow for three or four months or you don't mow grass for three four months out of the year that is when i feel like contracts are a little harder to enforce as well as sell to the customer the fact that you're collecting money from them during months and you didn't show up and there's snow there's snow out in the lawn for three or four weeks and you didn't show up and yet you're charging their credit card every single time you charge someone's credit card every single time you send them an invoice you're reminding that of your bill they're you're reminding them that hey you might want to cancel service and it's very easy to cancel service when they're still on the ground and they have not seen you in three to four weeks it's another opportunity for them to cancel and that's where i get worried so if you're in those areas though where you have florida and there's parts of texas and california where hey year-round level billing is fantastic because they consistently see you and it's not a big problem so the big question today though is not about whether you do level contract billing or whether you do uh you know just price per cut today the real question is how long did it take them to do this job in the comments below i want you to comment exactly how many minutes how many man hours quote unquote minutes it would take to do this job so assume your answer needs to assume one person doing the job there were two people in this job you gotta multiply that number by two and then do let me know so that's one comment the other comment i want to know do you do level billing and contracts or do you do price per cut or do you do some sort of hybrid in between because for some people hey we don't do contracts or we do level billing again might work for you so let us know in the comments below as a community we can learn from each other i'd love to hear from you i'm sure everyone else would too until next time i'm mike andy's we'll see you tomorrow