Landscape contractor software: install and maintenance

A landscape contractor runs two companies out of one yard. The install side quotes a patio, a retaining wall and an irrigation zone, works it for three weeks and bills it like construction. The maintenance side visits the same forty properties on a route, every week, for a price nobody reopens.

The install side loses money on scope it did not write down. The maintenance side loses it fifteen minutes at a time. Different leaks, one set of books.

Install work is measured, and the measurement has to survive

Square footage of paver, linear feet of edging, cubic yards of soil leaving the site, feet of drain line. The quantity on the invoice is the end of a calculation, not a tape reading.

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 sum to three decimal places, and a chain that does not resolve points at the character and the bracket. What the browser computes as you type, the server computes again when it saves. A chain written into a site report on the phone moves unchanged into the invoice line with a marker saying which report it came from.

Plants, stone, mulch and hardscape material sit in a price book you organize as a folder tree, cost, markup and sell price in the same row. A service is an assembly of cost types — labor minutes from a wage group, material, equipment, subcontracting — so a three-person crew with a skid steer is one line, not four guesses. A price typed once into a document goes back into the price book with one click.

The maintenance side leaks in fifteen-minute pieces

Twelve time types sit behind the hours, recorded on the phone, each with its own effect on target hours and the leave account. An hour taken into a document carries an origin marker and leaves the selection, so the same hour cannot reach two invoices. Anyone who wants it all out uses the CSV export with twelve selectable columns.

Say the limit plainly: Zirko does not generate recurring jobs. A weekly route is not created for you. There is no route optimization, no map of your trucks, and no clock-in with location checking — Zirko does not verify where anybody is standing. The planning board says who is on which property and when, from one week to half a year, with time off and holidays already on it, and it reports a double booking.

Whether landscaping is taxable is a state answer, and it is rarely obvious

Some states tax the materials and not the labor; some tax landscaping as a service outright; some treat an installed plant as an improvement to real property and a mowing visit as something else entirely. The same job is taxed three different ways in three states shows how far apart the answers sit.

Zirko suggests no rate. A US business enters its own rates, each with up to four components for State, County and City, and can issue an invoice with no tax line at all — a distinct state, not zero percent. Which jobs sit where is your call and your accountant's.

Seasonal crews are a classification question before they are a payroll one

Landscaping hires in April and lets go in November, and the helper who brings his own mower is the exact fact pattern the tests were written for — contractor or employee: three tests, and California's construction carve-out. What you paid them still has to be reportable at year end, and the threshold moved: the 1099-NEC threshold is no longer $600.

Zirko keeps the record — hours by person and job, vendor invoices read on your own device and hung on the job — and files nothing with anyone.

What it costs

Plans count office seats plus field licenses for crew who only work outside, and the mobile application comes with every office seat. Nothing is metered by jobs per month, which matters when one week is forty visits and the next is a single build. Fourteen days free, no payment details.