Business management software has become increasingly commonplace throughout multiple industries. The reason for this is pretty simple: having access to more information allows you to make more informed decisions. As your decision-making process improves, so does your business.
Many people may not associate the need for this type of software with the landscaping business. However, landscaping business software can help you manage your company’s services, productivity, and profits. With just a landscaping app on your company smartphone or tablet, you can harness the power of more informed decision-making and improve your business’s overall performance.
To better make the case for why all landscaping companies should use business management software, it helps to look at five key ways this type of software can help your business.
Improve Productivity from Top to Bottom
Perhaps the best way to keep your company’s profits growing is to do more with what you have. Far too often, inefficient operations are due to the need to conduct administrative duties, collect paperwork, or track down information. As your company grows and each of these tasks becomes more complex, the most effective members of your team are pulled away from their priorities to engage in this redundant or inefficient work.
With effective business management software, though, you can simplify each of these tasks. The Manage360 landscaping app, for example, makes it easier for your crews to focus on the work at hand instead of the related paperwork. The app allows your crew to clock in and out and track expenses without the need of collecting paper timecards or purchase reports. It also makes it easier to know exactly when a crew finishes the job and when, so you can ensure they’re not straying from the planned schedule.
Keep Your Customers Coming Back
It’s Business 101 to know that it’s better for your business to retain customers than to find new ones. Customer acquisition costs can be expensive and working with a familiar client allows your crew to operate efficiently.
With Manage360, you’ll be able to sand off any rough edges of your sales pipeline and make it easy to develop long-lasting relationships with your clients. The software allows you to quickly identify where in the pipeline each client is and whether there are bottlenecks in your processes that are causing them to drop off. This gives you insights you may not gain from simple customer surveys.
You’ll also be able to make more accurate quotes to best ensure clients aren’t left wondering if you underquoted them to simply win their business. By building a trusting relationship through accurate estimates and customized proposals that demonstrate you understand the client’s needs, they are more likely to seek you out again, as well as sing your praises to friends and neighbors.
Make Your Company More Profitable
At its most basic level, profit is easy to understand. However, as your company grows and becomes more complex, understanding what goes into its profitability can become difficult to decipher. Knowing where your business is making money or losing money requires the ability to access accurate information in one central location. It can be enlightening to learn that a favored service is actually losing money while one you never paid much attention to is bringing in the bucks.
When you use landscaping business management software like Manage360, you gain access to informative reports that detail the revenue and expenses of each service you offer, as well as the performance of each member of your team. You’ll also see which clients have been most helpful with referrals and which clients have the most unprofitable requests. When you compile all of this data together, you’ll make profit-driven decisions that allow your company to grow.
Grow Your Business Sustainably
Of course, growth for growth’s sake isn’t necessarily helpful for a business. Yes, you may be bringing in more revenue, but you also may find yourself matching that sales growth with increased expenses as you need to rent out more space, spend more on employee benefits, or purchase more tools. Growth, then, is often only worth it when revenue grows up while expenses, especially overhead, stay level.
This is where it helps to use effective business management software that’s designed specifically for landscaping businesses. Manage360, for instance, contains a project budgeting tool that can incorporate your costs, your overhead, and the expected revenue so you can ensure you’re still earning a profit as your company grows. It utilizes several recovery models so you can uncover different ways of maintaining profits even as expenses increase.
Stay in Control Over the Sprawl
When you first started your landscaping business, you probably used simple tools to keep track of everything. A few spreadsheets here, some handwritten notes there, and maybe the cheapest accounting software you could find were all that you needed to stay on top of the information that drove your decision-making.
As your business grew, though, you quickly found out that there wasn’t enough time in the day to manually update each spreadsheet. As you brought on more people to help you with this administrative work, they likely looked on in horror as you searched for the right Post-It that contained all the usernames and passwords for the cornucopia of software that enabled you to manage your business.
Beyond the specific needs referenced earlier, this is why it’s essential to use business management software to manage your landscaping business. You and your team can’t make effective decisions if there’s not one central source of truth upon which everyone operates. You won’t know if your business is making a profit and the reasons why or why not if you’re not sure the data is accurate. With every manual process your business uses, the opportunity for human error multiplies.
By using business management software designed specifically for landscaping businesses, though, you can centralize all necessary data and gain access to information and insights that are almost impossible to garner otherwise. Management software puts you back in control so you can make effective, informed, and profit-driven decisions.
Use Landscaping Business Software That Fits Your Needs
Our goal is to make it easier to run your business. This is why we developed Manage360, an industry-leading landscaping business management software program. To see a demo of how our software can help, contact us today for a demo.