For landscapers
The soil is paid for in week one. The job is paid for in week seven.
On an install, materials are most of the cost and all of the risk — and they are committed before a single claim goes out. Worksted puts the ordering, the dockets and the margin on the job while there is still something you can do about them.
Worked example
- The business
- A 12-person landscaping business
- The job
- Courtyard rebuild — retaining, paving, irrigation and advanced planting
- The site
- Body-corporate courtyard, 340 m², crane access one day only
A six-week courtyard install where the materials bill dwarfs the labour and the claims go out stage by stage.
One record, all the way through. The docket keeps up on its own — scroll, and watch it fill in. Marked in six weeks, week by week.
Priced in stages, because it will be built in stages
Retaining, paving, planting — each one its own stage with its own price. That is not a formatting choice: it is what lets you claim the retaining wall in week three without waiting on the plants.
New quote
DraftingRetaining wall, besser core-filled
18 m
$7,632.00
Bluestone paving, 400×400 sawn
96 m²
$10,848.00
Nothing is ordered until somebody signs it
The foreman builds the order on the phone at the yard. It waits on an owner or admin, and only then does the supplier get it — as an email from your business, with your PO number, the total, the delivery address and the date you need it.
Purchase order
Awaiting sign-offQuarry & landscape supplies
PO-0488 · raised by Nikau, at the yard
$8,426.00
inc. GST
Nothing is ordered until this is approved
The docket gets photographed at the gate
The delivery docket is read off the photo — supplier, lines, GST, total — checked against the paper to the cent, and confirmed by someone in the office before it counts. Then it is on the job as cost, not in a glovebox.
Supplier receipt
Read from photoTOTAL
$2,450.80
- Supplier
- Quarry & landscape supplies
- GST
- $222.80
- Total
- $2,450.80
They want lighting through the beds. Price it now.
A variation off the same price book, raised on site, sent by the office and accepted on a link. It joins the job as agreed work — and it is on the claim at the end rather than in an awkward phone call.
Claim the stage, not the job
Each finished stage is invoiced on its own, carrying only that stage’s money. Paving is billed while the planting is still going in, so six weeks of work is not six weeks of your money sitting in somebody else’s account.
What it made, and where it nearly went
Materials, labour and gross profit against the revenue — ex GST, because the tax was never yours. On a job where materials are the bigger half, that number moves with the supplier, and now you can see it move.
JOB-0641
PaidGross profit
$18,250.00
The job, start to finish
JOB-0641
Body-corporate courtyard · 340 m²
Quoted
Three stages, priced separately
$64,200.00
Committed on order
Ordered, not yet delivered
$29,850.00
Materials
Dockets read at the gate
$31,060.00
Labour
Six weeks, three on the tools
$18,740.00
Variation accepted
Bed lighting, week four
$3,850.00
Invoiced inc. GST
$74,855.00
Margin
26.8%
$18,250.00
Stage two — paving and drainage
Supply and install priced the way a landscaper prices it: by the square metre, by the cubic metre, by the plant, plus the hours to put it in the ground.
Your price book, your wording, your rates. Lines copy onto a quote the moment they’re added, so putting your prices up next month never rewrites what you sent last month.
A client on agreed rates gets those rates, baked into the line rather than remembered by whoever built the quote.
JOB-0641
Body-corporate courtyard · 340 m²
Ex GST unless shown
Bluestone paving, 400×400 sawn
96 m²
$10,848.00
Retaining wall, besser core-filled
18 m
$7,632.00
Screened topsoil, delivered
22 m³
$2,310.00
Advanced Waterhousea, 100 L
14 ea
$3,185.00
Landscape labourer
212 h
$11,872.00
What a six-week install has to have on file.
Long jobs accumulate obligations that arrive weeks apart. You write each rule once — what it is, whose it is, and which stage it holds — and the job tells you what it is waiting on rather than you remembering.
- Before-you-dig plan
- Set it to hold the stage from starting. Excavation is the one thing on this job you cannot undo, so the plan being on the job is a gate rather than a reminder.
- Traffic management plan for the crane day
- Attach it to that stage by hand from the job screen. It belongs to one day of a six-week job, and the record should say so.
- Construction induction card
- Sits on each person. Someone whose card is missing cannot be booked onto the site — the office is told who was left off and why, by name.
- Plant establishment record
- Build the form once with a photo field per bed. Filled in on the phone at handover, so the maintenance period starts from evidence rather than from a date in an email.
You write these rules yourself, once — what evidence, who it’s for, when it’s due and what it holds up. From then on they raise themselves.
Three ways this work loses money.
Not software problems — landscapers problems. Here is what Worksted does about each of them.
The order that came in over
On a materials-heavy job a few per cent on the stone is the whole profit. Committed cost — what has been ordered but not yet delivered — sits against the job from the moment the order goes to the supplier, so the number you are watching already includes what you have promised to pay.
Six weeks of your own money
Waiting until handover to invoice funds the client’s courtyard out of your account. Bill each stage as it finishes, carrying only that stage’s money, and the cash arrives while the job is still running.
The client who kept adding things
Lighting in week four, a second gate in week five, both agreed standing in the mud. Each one is a priced variation the client accepts on a link, so the final claim is not the first time anybody sees the number.
Put your next install on it.
Fourteen days. Raise one purchase order against a job and watch committed cost move before a single docket lands.
Not quite your line of work