Landscaping software: builds and rounds

A landscaping business is two businesses wearing the same shirt. One of them builds — retaining walls, paving, drainage, irrigation, planting — in jobs that run for weeks and are quoted like construction. The other one maintains: the same twenty properties, over and over, at a price nobody renegotiates.

They need opposite things from software, which is why so many landscapers end up with a spreadsheet for one half and a notebook for the other.

Structural landscaping is construction, and gets priced like it

A retaining wall is measured, a paved area is measured, and so is every cubic metre of soil that has to leave the site. In Zirko the line item keeps the calculation rather than the result: a chain such as 100+(5.1*4)/2 stays in the measurement row, up to five hundred rows are summed to three decimal places, and a chain that does not resolve points at the character and the bracket. What the browser works out while you type, the server works out again when it saves.

A chain written into the site report on the phone moves unchanged into the invoice line, with a marker saying which report it came from. Nobody measures twice and nobody retypes a number.

Plants, pavers, aggregates and turf live in a price list you build as a folder tree, with cost, markup and sell price in the same row. A service is an assembly of cost types — labour minutes from a wage group, material, equipment, subcontracting — so the day rate for a two-person crew with a bobcat is one line rather than four guesses. What you typed once into a document goes back into the price list with one click.

The maintenance side is where the billing leaks

Recurring work leaks money quietly: the extra half hour, the green waste run, the replacement plant nobody wrote down. Twelve time types sit behind the hours in Zirko, nine of them requestable from the phone, and an hour taken into a document carries an origin marker and leaves the selection — the same hour cannot reach two invoices.

Be plain about the gap: Zirko does not generate recurring jobs. A weekly round is not created for you, there is no route optimisation, and there is no map of your utes. The planning board says who is on which property and when, from one week to half a year, with leave, sickness and public holidays already on it — and it says so when somebody is booked twice.

Seasonal work and the GST line

Landscaping turnover arrives in a lump, which is exactly the shape that trips the registration test. It is a rolling twelve months, not last financial year and not the balance in the account — it is not last year's turnover.

The casual who came for the busy six weeks and the subcontractor who brought his own excavator are different questions with different answers, and an invoice without an ABN makes one of them yours immediately: now it is your problem.

Working under a builder changes who controls the money

Structural landscaping on a residential build is usually a construction contract, which means payment runs on a statute rather than on the head contractor's cash flow — and the deadlines are different in every jurisdiction: eight jurisdictions, eight sets of deadlines.

Zirko issues document numbers on the server from ranges with no gaps, and an issued invoice can no longer be changed: a correction is a credit note or a cancellation with its own number. An unanswered quote or an overdue document can be followed up on a deadline you set, with a text you wrote, and every message is logged with its trigger, recipient and moment so nothing goes out twice.

What it costs

Plans count office seats, with field licences for anyone who only works outside, and the mobile application comes with every office seat. Nothing is metered by jobs per month — which matters in a trade where one week is forty mowing visits and the next is a single build. Fourteen days free, full range of functions, no payment details.