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35 Hidden Ways Landscape Management Software increases your ROI

Streamlined Business is Better Business

There are always a few obvious ways business management software achieves the ROI providers promise their customers, going paperless, simplified invoicing, and cost controls.  However, there are many other not so obvious ways landscape management software increases the ROI.  Some of these may not apply to your business model but many of them are universal.  After going through the list, you may see how truly significant the ROI on business management software actually is.  Sometimes one of these often-overlooked benefits alone will recover your investment many times over.

  1. Postpones hiring of additional staff by making current employees more efficient.
  2. Improves employee retention by making their workflow less frustrating.
  3. Reduce lost opportunity costs.
  4. Provide for staff the option for remote work.
  5. Employee retention, does your software make your employees work easier, faster, more accurate.  Does it help them be home with their families and improve their quality of life?  Does this translate to improved customer service?
  6. Improve customer service that translates to customer retention.  Customer Portal can automate service requests, service notifications, and payments freeing up staff time and speeding up response time.
  7. Stop, reduce, or prevent low margin work.
  8. Automate annual contract renewals with price increases.
  9. Identify at-risk clients to improve client retention.
  10. Reduce employee downtime or windshield time.
  11. Identify, target your most profitable work and help you expand that service.
  12. Bundle services or service packages to improve overall margins.  Bundling a less profitable service with a more profitable one can increase the overall sale but keep the fixed cost (windshield time) the same thereby increasing the overall margin.  
  13. Reduce payroll processing time while improving accuracy.  
  14. Easily forecast labor and material costs months in advance to help avoid overtime or cash flow costs.  
  15. Quickly provide a flexible work schedule to reduce overtime.  Move the schedule with just a few clicks due to weather or holidays and adjust for weekends.  This should allow crews to work ahead if severe weather is anticipated or a weekday holiday is on the calendar.
  16. Eliminate the diminishing returns due to double data entry or unnecessary data entry.
  17. Quickly find the needle in the haystack that is costing you and secondary is eliminating needles over time.
  18. Partners with or integrates with other best in class software (e.g. accounting, payroll, GPS) to provide synergy.
  19. Reminders that humans simply forget.  Ever had an expensive repair to piece of equipment just days after it went out of warranty.  Reminders to have the equipment checked just before it goes out of warranty can be priceless.
  20. Recover lost equipment, deter or prevent theft is even better.
  21. Improve safety, reduce Worker Compensation costs or premiums.
  22. Prevent costly fines or penalties.  If you have ever been through a sales tax audit or compliance audit, the information to comply with these audits is not completely contained in your accounting system.
  23. Smooth transitions between account managers.  A large amount of time can be spent bringing a new account manager on and the transition of knowledge can lead to customer frustration and dissatisfaction.  The software should have an easily searchable history of a property or customer to speed the transition.
  24. Easily update material pricing to maintain accurate margins.
  25. Forecast labor hours and cost projections months in advance to reduce unnecessary overtime and reflect those increase costs at renewal time.
  26. Provide graphic Business Intelligence to improve decision making. Data is presented in the format of your choosing (e.g. gauges, pie charts, bar charts). 
  27. Cloud-based to avoid unnecessary IT expenses.
  28. The software is currently ready to accommodate your growth.  Avoid sunken costs in an obsolete system or one you will outgrow by right-sizing your software.
  29. The value of Real-Time!  Having information in real-time avoids finding out too late there is a problem that needs to be addressed.  The clients and dollars lost because of delayed information transfer can be significant.  Real-Time data can often help you address problems before a client even knows the problem exists.
  30.  Turn around time for proposals is dramatically decreased converting more proposals to actual sales as you respond promptly. 
  31. Do you have an admin bottleneck immediately after a snow event? Managing a snow event and a green season maintenance contract are very different. To expedite the issuing of invoices to your customers and payments to your subcontractors, BOSS has an area dedicated to snow/ice management.
  32. Establish standard processes (e.g. estimating) known to work so you can hire new people and know the processes they will need are in place to help you scale your company and reduce the time to onboard new employees.
  33. Proficiently manage your job materials inventory and know with confidence your true cost of goods sold.
  34.  Stop relying on paper timesheets that may not accurately represent the actual time spent on jobs. Don’t let unreported hours slip through the cracks. Record T&M electronically and go paperless.
  35. Use Work Order automation to reach out to current clients in mass to close an optional service that was listed on their signed agreements, but they have not yet purchased. Spend minutes using this feature and possibly book a substantial amount of additional services.