Wide shot from where the truck parks
Not the pretty angle — the crew's angle. The distance from the trailer to the work is where wheelbarrow and hose-drag hours hide.
Trades / Landscaping
Quoting and job management software for landscaping businesses
Landscaping is three businesses wearing one shirt: the route, the cleanup and the install. Mason asks the questions that fit the one in front of it, prices from your own rates, and sends you anything that needs a walk of the property.
Join the waitlistIntake
What landscaping customers get asked.
Each one can be answered by looking, pacing it off, or pushing a hand into a bed. No customer is asked to know cubic yards or lawn square footage.
- 01
Is this every-visit work, or a one-time job?
Frequency is the biggest number on a maintenance quote. Weekly and every-other-week are not the same stop — two weeks of growth takes longer to cut, bag and blow than one week does.
- 02
How tall is the grass right now — ankle, shin, or knee?
Ankle is a mow. Knee is a first cut with a different machine, a slower pass and a pile of clippings to deal with.
- 03
How big is the yard? Pace the front and the back, or read the lot size off your tax record.
Maintenance prices inside lot-size bands. The band is the price, so the band is the question.
- 04
Is the yard fenced, and how wide is the gate? Put a tape on it.
A 36-inch gate keeps the rider on the trailer and puts a push mower in the back yard. That one measurement changes time on site more than square footage does.
- 05
How many beds, and roughly how long and how wide is each one? Steps are fine.
Mulch and plantings price off bed area. Nobody can count beds from a photo of a front yard taken from the sidewalk.
- 06
Push your fingers into the existing mulch. Is there about an inch under there, or four?
Top-dressing thin mulch and stripping four inches of old material out of a bed are two different jobs at two different prices.
- 07
Is there a slope you would not push a mower up?
Slope moves the work to a walk-behind, a string trimmer, or hands. It is the most under-quoted thing in maintenance.
- 08
Where does the debris go — a spot on the property, or does it leave with the crew?
Haul-off is its own line. A load of yard waste is priced by the load and the scale ticket, not by the hour it took to rake.
- 09
Are there sprinkler heads, low-voltage lights, or an invisible fence in the work area?
Anything shallow gets flagged before the crew works, or replaced after. Knowing beforehand is the whole difference.
Photo tasks
The photos that matter for landscaping.
Customers photograph the pretty part of the yard. The price lives in the gate, the grade and the ground, so those are the shots Mason asks for.
The gate, with a tape across it
The most common reason a mowing quote comes back wrong. Photograph the opening, not the fence, and get the number in the frame.
Grass height against something known
A boot, a soda can, a tape stood on end. Grass height is impossible to judge from a photo without a reference, and it decides whether the first visit is a mow or a rescue.
The slope, shot from the side
From the top of a hill, every hill looks flat. Have the customer stand across the yard and shoot the grade in profile.
The bed edge
Cut edge, plastic, steel or stone. Re-cutting an edge is labor by the foot, and a stone edge means hand work around every curve.
Mulch depth, up close
A hand or a trowel pushed into the bed. Depth is what decides yards ordered, and yards ordered is most of the mulch price.
The debris spot and the way out to it
Where a pile can stage, and what a wheelbarrow has to cross to reach it. A tarp drag across a finished lawn is a different job than a tailgate toss.
Heads, lights and flags
Irrigation heads, path lights, invisible-fence flags, and the meter lid. Everything that lives an inch under the turf and costs money when it gets clipped.
Rate sheet
How landscaping quotes get priced.
Mason works from the sheet you already price off, in the units you already sell. How quoting works.
The units you actually sell
Maintenance prices per visit inside a lot-size band, set by frequency, and is usually sold as a season rather than a stop. Cleanups price by crew-hour — the two-person hour is the real unit — plus dump fees by the load and a trailer charge. Mulch prices per cubic yard installed, using the supplier increments and rounding rules in your own price book. Sod prices by the pallet or the square foot, with prep on its own line, because killing, stripping and grading the old lawn is usually more work than laying the new one. Plants price by container size. Every route carries a trip minimum, because the drive is part of the job.
What the site moves
Gate width. Grade. The distance from the trailer to the work. Debris volume, and whether the transfer station charges you by the load or by the ton. Whether there is water on site for an install. A yard of mulch covers a different amount of ground at two inches than at three, so depth is a priced choice, not a detail somebody fills in later.
How the customer gets an answer
A mow inside a lot-size band, beds the customer measured, a cleanup with the whole yard in frame: those come back as an exact quote from your prices. A back yard nobody can see, or a job described as making it look nice, comes back as a price range or a note that your team is reviewing it.
Honest limits
What a yard photo cannot price.
This is the part of landscaping that has to come back to your office. Mason routes it to you with the photos and the address already attached.
Drainage and grade
Water does not show up in a photo taken on a dry Tuesday. Where it stands, where it runs and what it will do to a new bed is a walk of the property, ideally after rain.
What is under the grass
Clay, rock, fill, and the construction debris somebody buried when the house went up. Nothing on the surface says which one you are digging into.
Irrigation
A photo shows heads. It does not show whether the zones run, where the valves are buried, or what an edger cut through two seasons ago.
Tree work
Lean, dead wood, what is under it and what is over it. Tree work is an on-site look every time, and it should stay that way.
Illustrative example
Weekly mowing on a corner lot, plus a spring cleanup and four beds re-mulched at three inches. The photos show a 36-inch side gate and grass at shin height. Mason prices the mow in that company's lot-size band, adds their first-cut rate for the overgrowth, prices the beds at their installed yard rate, and notes the gate so the crew loads the walk-behind. The corner that stays soft by the downspout goes to the office for a look, not into the number.
The calendar
Coming soonWhat landscaping jobs need on the calendar.
A landscaping calendar is a route with weather on top of it. Scheduling is on the way. Quoting and follow-up are what ship today.
01
Route density runs the week
Maintenance money is in the drive between stops, not the price per lawn. A day is built from yards a few minutes apart, and one yard rescheduled out of order can unbuild it.
02
Rain moves the route, not the job
You do not cut a soaked lawn — it ruts and it clumps and the customer sees both. One rain day pushes every stop behind it, and Saturday is where the overflow lands.
03
The season is not flat
Spring cleanup, then mulch, then the growth peak, then leaves, then the fall planting window. Crews get hired for the peak and stand around in the trough. The calendar is where that gets managed, or does not.
04
Install work waits on heat and water
Sod laid ahead of a heat wave with no water on site is a callback with a date on it. Planting into frozen ground is not planting.
05
One truck, one trailer
Crew size sets what a day holds. Two people cut, a third makes a cleanup possible, and there is still only one trailer behind the truck.
06
Establishment belongs on the calendar
New sod and new plants need weeks of watering the customer is doing. That is a check-in, not a job, and it is the difference between a lawn that takes and a warranty call.
07
Permits are rare until they are not
Maintenance almost never needs one. Tree removal, regrading and anything touching the right-of-way sometimes do, and that is a date somebody else controls.
Most maintenance shops sell more than grass. If you also set posts or run a dump trailer, the fencing and junk removal pages cover how those two get quoted, and they do not get quoted like a lawn.
01Can it quote recurring mowing?Coming soon
It quotes the visit today, from your lot-size bands and your frequency pricing, and Mason follows up by email if the customer goes quiet. Putting those visits on a route and a calendar is not built yet.
02Does it price a landscape design?
No. A design gets drawn with the customer, not priced off a snapshot. Mason collects the photos, the measurements and what they are after, then hands the whole thing to you.
03What about mulch — will it order yards for me?
It prices the beds at your installed per-yard rate once the customer gives length, width and depth. What you order, where you buy it and what you pay for it stays yours.
04We do cleanups and hauling. Same intake?
Yes, and the debris questions come with it — where the pile goes, whether it leaves with the crew, and how much of it there is. If the load is really a haul-off job, the junk removal intake asks better questions about it.