Spatchr for Lawn & Landscape
Measure the lawn once. Bill it forty times.
The polygon you walk in March is the same polygon that prices every cut until November — and the same one you quote the bed rebuild from when the customer finally asks in July.
Unit economics
How a lawn & landscape job gets priced
Mowing is priced per visit, but the per-visit number has to come from somewhere, and "it looks like a forty-dollar lawn" stops working the moment somebody else is driving the mower. So you measure the turf — not the parcel. The lot is a quarter acre; the grass you actually cut might be six thousand square feet of it once the house, the drive, the beds and the patio are taken out. Trace the mowable area, exclude what you do not cut, and that figure becomes the basis for the recurring price. From there most operators build a rate that steps down with size, because a large open lawn cuts faster per square foot than a small awkward one — the mower spends more time cutting and less time turning. A minimum per visit then protects the small lots, where the drive and the unload dominate whatever the turf figure says. Installation work prices from the opposite direction. A bed rebuild, a mulch run or a planting job is materials plus labour against a measured area, quoted once and done once, and it is usually two to twenty times the value of a single cut. The measurement still does the work: mulch is depth times area, sod is area, edging is the distance around it. The turf figure pays for itself a third time on product. Square footage is what determines how much fertiliser, seed or treatment a property consumes, so the same number that sets the price also tells you what to load on the truck for a round of twenty.
-
Mowable area
Turf square feet, not lot size
The parcel includes the house, the driveway and the beds. Pricing off lot size overcharges open properties and undercharges dense ones, and both errors are visible to customers who talk to each other.
-
Obstacle density
Complexity adjustment
Trees, beds, play equipment, a trampoline and a dog run turn open mowing into trimming. Two lawns of identical area can differ by fifteen minutes, and the difference is entirely how many times you stop.
-
Gates and access
Access adjustment
A back garden reachable only through a narrow side gate means the ride-on stays on the trailer and the whole rear is done with a push mower. It is the single most under-priced condition in residential mowing.
-
Slope
Terrain adjustment
Anything steep enough to need a walk-behind, or to be cut across rather than up and down, is slower and harder on both the operator and the machine.
-
Material depth
Cubic yards from area
On the install side the area is only half the quantity. Mulch at two inches over eight hundred square feet is five cubic yards; at three inches it is seven and a half, and that difference is the margin on the job.
Minimum charge
You set a per-visit floor when you build the catalog. On a dense weekly route the minimum matters less than in one-off trades — the stops are close together — but it still stops a tiny courtyard from being priced at eleven dollars because that is what the square footage said.
Schematic — Measured surface
Cadence and routing
Getting back there at the right time
This is the trade recurring service plans were built for. A mowing customer is not a job, they are a standing arrangement — every seven days from April to October, roughly thirty visits, at the same price each time. A service plan in Spatchr carries the cadence and generates the visits, so Tuesday's round exists without anybody assembling it. That sounds small until you are running sixty properties on a four-day rotation and somebody asks whether the Hendersons were done last week. Territories then group the round geographically, which in mowing is nearly the entire economics of the business. Stops are twenty to forty minutes; drives between them should be three, not fifteen. A round that grew by accepting customers in call order rather than in map order will quietly cost an hour a day forever, and the fix is a planning problem rather than a driving one. Install work sits on top of that as one-off jobs rather than plan visits, and it is deliberately scheduled into the gaps — a rain day, a slow week in August, the fortnight after growth stops but before leaves drop. Keeping both on one calendar is what stops a two-day patio job from quietly eating a Tuesday round. Growth changes the cadence rather than the plan. In peak growth you are on a seven-day cycle; by September many lawns stretch to ten or fourteen days. Shifting a plan's cadence moves the whole set of upcoming visits rather than requiring thirty individual reschedules.
Schematic — Tuesday, 10 stops
Your service catalog
What you start with
Spatchr does not ship a starter catalog for lawn & landscape — the one bundled template covers exterior cleaning. You build yours, which takes about ten minutes and is worth doing properly once. Here is the shape most operators land on.
- Mowing — weeklysq ft
The core recurring service, priced from measured turf area with a per-visit minimum. Most operators set a rate band by property size rather than a strict per-foot figure.
- Trimming and edgingsq ft
Usually bundled into the mow price rather than sold separately, but worth existing as a line so a property with unusual edging can be priced up without a special case.
- Fertilisationsq ft
Priced straight off the measured area, and the clearest example of the measurement doing double duty — the same number tells you what to charge and how much product to load.
- Aeration and overseedingsq ft
A seasonal add-on, once or twice a year, sold to the existing round rather than to new customers. Square footage drives both the price and the machine time.
- Mulch and bed installationsq ft
The most common install job, and the one where measurement matters most — cubic yards are area times depth, and guessing that number is where the margin on a bed job disappears.
- Sod and plantingsq ft
Materials plus labour against a measured area. Quoted once, done once, and typically worth a season of cuts on the same property.
- Leaf removalhour
The one lawn service that resists area pricing. Volume depends on the trees, not the turf, so most operators bill it hourly or as a seasonal flat rate.
- Spring and autumn cleanuphour
Bookend jobs that top and tail the season. Hourly, because what needs doing varies more than any measurement predicts.
Proof and paperwork
Showing the customer what they paid for
Weekly work generates almost no disputes about whether it happened and a steady trickle of questions about billing — which weeks were skipped for rain, whether the September gap was two visits or three, what the total was for the season. The visit record answers those without argument, because every generated visit is either completed, skipped or rescheduled, with a date attached. A month's invoice built from four completed visits is checkable rather than assertible. Photographs matter less on the maintenance side than in the exterior trades, with one exception worth building into the routine: damage. A sprinkler head you clipped, a section scalped on a hump, a bed edge that was already ragged when you arrived. Photograph it at the visit, note it, and mention it before the customer finds it. Weekly customers forgive mistakes they are told about and remember the ones they discover. Install work is the reverse. A finished bed, a new path, a planting scheme is the single best piece of marketing you will produce that month, and it needs to be photographed on the day and stored against the job rather than lost in a phone.
The measurement that keeps paying
Most trades on this site measure a property once and bill it once, maybe again in two years. Mowing measures once and bills thirty times a season, for as long as the customer stays.
That changes what the measurement is worth. Thirty seconds spent tracing the mowable turf accurately in April is amortised across the entire season and every season after it. Getting it wrong is amortised the same way — a lawn priced ten dollars light is three hundred dollars a year, quietly, until somebody notices.
It is also the reason to exclude what you do not cut. The parcel boundary is easy to trace and tempting to use, but a quarter-acre lot on a suburban street might be six thousand square feet of grass and five thousand of house, driveway, patio and planting. Two customers with identical lot sizes can have genuinely different lawns, and pricing them the same is how you end up with one customer feeling cheated and another you are subsidising.
Plans, not appointments
The mental shift that makes this trade manageable is treating a customer as a standing arrangement rather than a series of bookings.
A service plan holds the cadence — every seven days, April to October — and produces the visits. Tuesday’s round is generated, not assembled. Nobody has to remember that the Hendersons are fortnightly and the Patels moved to Thursdays.
At ten properties you could hold that in your head. At sixty you cannot, and the failure mode is not dramatic: it is one missed property a month, each of which is an apologetic phone call and occasionally a lost customer. A generated round removes the category of error entirely.
Route density is the margin
Here is the arithmetic that decides whether a mowing business works.
A residential cut is twenty to forty minutes. If your stops are three minutes apart, a day holds twelve properties. If they are fifteen minutes apart, the same day holds eight. Same work, same equipment, same fuel bill, two-thirds of the revenue.
Rounds rarely get spread out deliberately. They get spread out by saying yes — to the customer eight miles away who called in June, and the one across town who was a referral. Each individual yes is obviously worth it. The cumulative effect is a route that costs an hour a day.
Territories exist to make that visible while it is happening rather than at the end of a season. When a new enquiry lands, the question is not just whether the price is right; it is whether the property sits inside a day you already drive to.
The round is the best sales channel you will ever have
The most valuable thing about a weekly maintenance business is not the weekly revenue. It is that you stand on sixty properties thirty times a year and notice things.
A bed that has collapsed. A fence panel gone. A tree that should come out before it takes the garage with it. A lawn that has thinned so badly it needs sod rather than seed. Every one of those is an install job at ten to fifty times the value of a cut, sold to somebody who already trusts you, at a marketing cost of zero.
The reason to run both sides in one app is that they share the property record. The shape you traced in April to price the mow is the shape you quote the mulch from in July. The customer, the history, the photographs and the invoices are one thread rather than two systems that disagree.
Otto turns the thing you noticed into a quote before you forget it
Here is what actually happens on a Tuesday. You spot the bed while you are unloading, you mean to quote it, and by the time you have done eleven more properties it is gone. Next spring somebody else does it.
That gap is the one Otto closes. Standing there, you tell him to quote a mulch install for the front beds at this property. He finds the customer, reads the measured area you already have, builds the line items off your own rate card, and shows you the estimate before anything is written. You look at it, change the depth, and send it — or bin it. Nothing reaches the customer until you approve it.
It matters more here than anywhere else on this site, because maintenance work is the trade with the least time to stop and type. Thirty stops a day is thirty chances to notice something and no realistic window to sit down and write it up. A minute of talking at the truck is a window you actually have.
Questions people actually ask
- Should I price from lot size or the part I actually cut?
- The part you cut, always. Lot size includes the house, the driveway and the beds, which can be half the parcel on a suburban property. Measuring the mowable turf takes an extra thirty seconds and produces a number you can defend to a customer who compares notes with a neighbour whose lot is the same size but whose garden is mostly patio.
- How do weekly visits get created?
- A service plan carries the cadence and generates them, so the round exists without being rebuilt. You are managing an arrangement rather than a calendar, which is what makes sixty weekly properties administratively possible for one person.
- Can I run maintenance and installation work in the same app?
- Yes, and they behave differently on purpose. Maintenance lives on service plans that generate visits on a cadence; installs are one-off jobs with their own estimate and their own schedule. They share the customer, the property and the measured shapes, which is the whole reason a mowing round is such a good source of install work.
- What happens when growth slows in autumn?
- Change the plan's cadence rather than editing individual visits. Moving a property from seven days to fourteen adjusts everything upcoming at once, which is the difference between a two-minute seasonal adjustment and an afternoon of rescheduling across the whole round.
- Does the app help with fertiliser and mulch quantities?
- Indirectly, and usefully. Because every property carries a measured area, a round's total square footage is a number you already have — and that is what determines how much product to mix, load or order. Most operators discover they were over-ordering once they can see the real total.
- Why does Spatchr not ship a lawn care catalog?
- The one bundled starter catalog covers exterior cleaning, so lawn and landscape services are something you build. It takes about ten minutes, and it is genuinely better done yourself here than in the washing trades, because mowing rates are set far more by local market than by any national logic.
Neighbouring trades
Curated by real overlap — shared routes, shared ladders, shared customers — not by an alphabetical list of everything else.
Put your lawn & landscape pricing on the phone
Before you download
Android and the browser do different jobs
Sign in once. After that the Android app runs on the phone's own database — measure, photograph and price a job in a basement or a dead zone, and it syncs the moment you have signal again.
The web app is a live connection to your data, so it needs a signal and a sign-in.
| Capability | Android app | Web browser |
|---|---|---|
| Works with no signal | Yes — after your first sign-in | No — needs a connection |
| Sign-in required | Yes, once | Yes, every session |
| Measure on site, camera, GPS | Yes | Limited |
| Invoices, estimates, reports | Yes | Yes |
| Best for | The truck, the roof, the yard | The office desk |