While you are an expert when it comes to making your client’s lawns look like they belong in a Home & Garden magazine, and your clients love you for it, there is more to running a successful lawn and landscaping business than just mowing lawns and weed eating gardens. You also need to think about all of the behind the scenes business owner aspects of being your own boss. Everything from payment processing, setting your prices, contracts , and even what landscaping booking app to use. Whether you are a lawn care business or specialize in plantings and landscape design, the right software for bookings, payments and communicating with your clients can make all the difference.
The following is a guide for what you need from a booking app for landscaping, gardening, and lawn maintenance businesses that will explain exactly what you need, how to set it up, and how to automate your client schedule so you can truly focus on growing your booming lawn care business.
Why You Need a Booking App for Your Lawn and Garden Business
Lawn clients today demand flexibility and accuracy from their lawn maintenance. They expect you to be able to make their lawn look manicured and beautiful in a timely and efficient manner. It’s much easier to keep up with your clients exacting demands if you are using a mobile-first, best in class booking and payments system. Think about it this way. How many times have you had to check and re-check the schedule? What happens when you have a team and everyone doesn’t sync their calendars? The nightmare of double-booking (or missing a job entirely) happens to even the best landscapers if they don’t have an excellent system.
The best booking software for landscapers will come in an app. Most landscapers will want to be able to manage their business easily on their phone between appointments.You are constantly on the go, finishing one yard and then moving on to the next one in your busy schedule. If you have to wait until you get back to the office to get on your computer to check your schedule, you will miss important notifications and potentially lose out on income from potential new jobs. That’s why landscapers and gardeners need a mobile first booking solution.
Lead Gen Forms, Estimates and Bookings for Landscapers
Landscapers and Lawn Care Industry pros aren’t a one size fits all industry. Every lawn is a different size and every landscaping project has its own scope of work.
That said, a great booking app can help landscapers automate important steps in their process to streamline bringing in more landscaping business and saving time and money.
One thing a lot of landscapers will want is a booking app with a lead gen form. When a client asks to book a landscaper for the first time, it can take them to a form of questions that landscaping pros will need to provide an estimate. Then all the information the pro needs lands in their message box so they can deliver a quote faster than the competition with the right information to profit on the quote.
After giving that first estimate, landscapers will also want software that can schedule their clients for that price at regular intervals. Many clients will want their lawn service once or twice a month and it helps to have that process automated with the pricing that fits their lawn.
As a professional landscaper, you are booking people for a wide array of services and will need to make sure you are staying well organized with your booking system. Whether you are booking routine lawn maintenance, tree trimming, laying down sod, or doing a full landscape for new construction, you need a landscaping booking app that will keep you organized and on time so you can give your clients the beautiful yard they desire.
Many people start out using things like a simple Google calendar, paper planner, or even one of the many free softwares out there. The problem is, all of these can actually cause more chaos and confusion. When you are doing it all on your own, it can be hard to manage everything you need to do when it comes to your appointments. It’s important for your booking system to integrate with everything else you use including payments, contracts, estimates, subscriptions and even automated text reminders.
Getting your appointment setting to where it is an automatic process is KEY to success within the lawncare industry. It makes it easy on you, easy on your clients, and everyone wins. So when you are ready to take your lawn business to the next level of professionalism, it really is important to have good systems in place.
What Should a Good Professional Landscaping Booking App Do?
So what should a great professional landscaping booking app look like? We are going to walk you through some of the most important things you need to have when choosing the best booking platform for your growing lawn business.
Allow Your Clients to Easily Book their Lawn and Garden Appointment with You Online
First and foremost, you need to be able to have your clients easily book you online. A good app will allow you to make a beautiful custom booking page that you can share with your clients. This will allow them to see when you are available, pick the service and time they want you to come to their property, and book their appointment right there without ever having to play phone tag with you. Your app should also allow clients to set their appointments as recurring. Most people who get lawn maintenance want it on a regular basis. So you should be able to easily allow clients to select weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly package options. That way they only have to book once, and will have a set appointment every time they need it. You will also want a process where you can use online lead forms in order to make estimates quickly based on the size of the lawn or the scope of the landscaping project.
They should also be able to go back in and reschedule themselves with your other available times if they need to.
This takes a lot of stress off of you as a business owner and gives you the freedom to really focus on your services.
Send Contracts, Forms, and Waivers to the Client Automatically
As a landscaper, contracts and forms are extremely important. Clients need to know exactly what to expect from the lawn maintenance services that they are booking, be able to answer questions about their property, needs, types of plants and grass, and how they want their lawn to look, and you need to ensure that you are protected from any liability or potential chargebacks.
We know that pretty much every professional landscaper uses forms and contracts, so it is important to have a booking app for your business that can automatically send those to your clients.
When they book, the client should be sent an initial intake form. This is where they will put all of their information regarding their property. If the appointment is for something large like a total landscaping job for a new construction home, then you need to be able to add as many fields as you need to get all of the information that you require. Intake forms make it so much easier to know what you are walking into with any lawn maintenance job, and if it is even an appointment you want to take on.
As far as contracts go, these are the backbone of a landscaping business, especially for recurring maintenance and large gardening and landscaping jobs. You should be able to send your clients a custom contract regarding their services right through your booking app. This will detail dates, location , how long you expect to be on their property working, and how often you will be coming back for routine lawn maintenance, stating that you are not to be held liable for damage to their yard if they were to leave out important information that would have led you to recommend a different course of action or even not take on the appointment at all .
If you were to do all of this manually, it would take a lot of time out of your already busy day. So it is extremely important that you look for a landscaping booking app that can automatically handle all of this work for you.
Accept Credit Cards for Deposits and Automatic Payments
Another important thing that your landscaping booking app should do is accept credit cards for automatic deposits and payments.
When clients book an appointment with you, you should be able to automatically prompt them to enter their payment information so that you get your deposit upfront. That way, if they happen to cancel last minute you still have something to show for the time you should have been booked for.
Once services are rendered, your booking app should be able to send that full payment invoice to the client and automatically charge their card on file. This is great for you since you will never have those awkward moments of handing your client a bill and asking for payment in person. It makes it easy for you, easy for the client, and again, everyone wins.
Send Confirmations and Notifications Automatically
One of the most, if not the most, important things your landscaping booking app should do is to send out confirmations and notifications to your clients automatically.
Appointment reminders will help make sure that your client always remembers the exact time of their appointment. We have seen that simply by making sure you send automatic appointment reminders, your clients who forget about the appointment and do things like forget to leave a gate unlocked or don’t put their dog inside the house, end up decreasing significantly!
Just think about it, some people are making appointments a month or more in advance. It is highly likely that some of these people will forget to write down their appointments and will then simply forget about their appointment. Reminders will not only help you make sure your time is not wasted, it will also help your clients remember their own appointments.
While it is possible for you to manually send out these reminder texts and emails, that will start to really dig into your time that would be better spent on more productive things like continuing education, working on other clients, or marketing your lawn services. That’s why we recommend automatic reminders that you simply set up and let run on their own. You just pick the frequency that the reminders will be sent, and you are good to go!
What Professional Landscaping Booking App Should I Use?
Now that you know what a great lawn care app should look like, now is the time to decide which one you should use.
If you want everything we mentioned above, and so much more, then PocketSuite may be right for your lawn and garden business.
PocketSuite has everything you need to run your landscaping business right from your phone. Not only do we offer a home services specific version of the app, we also have an amazing customer service team who are ready and willing to help walk you through everything you need to get the most out of your booking app. If you are moving from another platform to PocketSuite, the team will help you transfer everything over so you don’t ever have to worry about missing out on any appointments that you already had scheduled.
We know how important your time is, and we want to help you save time and make more money. We believe in our app so much that we offer a 30-day risk free trial ( you don’t even have to enter a credit card to get ALL of the benefits). During these 30 days, you can have one-on-one calls with our customer care team and get all of your questions answered, everything transferred over, and have everything set up just the way you want for your unique business.
So what are you waiting for? Give PocketSuite a try for your landscaping business today and see how we can help you grow your business into an empire!