A Guide to Landscape Business Management and Construction Estimating Software
—
The Content Team,
HALSTEAD.
Growing pains are a good problem to have—but they must be overcome if a construction or landscape company wishes to continue down the path of efficient growth.
These cloud-based online platforms can help you optimize processes and increase efficiency throughout your entire organization, allowing you to serve a higher number of clients or customers and dramatically increase profitability—without adding additional team members and incurring extra payroll expenses.
Popular Pick for Construction Management Software: BuilderTrend
Made for construction companies and contractors
Priced at $299 - $499 monthly (view plans)
Established in 2006
Almost all thriving companies eventually run into a big problem—they use the same internal processes as they did when they were first starting out. A ragtag combination of documents, spreadsheets and other simple tools was thrown together to handle customer acquisition, backend management, and financial processes. At the start, this hodgepodge of tools worked just fine—but now that your company has expanded, gaps in efficiency have grown larger and become overall untenable.
BuilderTrend is a robust construction management platform that aims to take all facets of a construction company and consolidate them under one roof.
Specifically, BuilderTrend focuses on these four core parts of your construction business:
Pre-sales process. Impress potential clients and customers, win business with better marketing strategies, and increase revenue in a tangible way.
Project management. Assign tasks, manage team members, and make everything run as smoothly as silk.
Financial tools. Manage billing, credit card payments, and everything else related to money in and out.
Customer management. Provide better and faster support to increase client and customer satisfaction and retention.
With all of the tools you need accessible from one easy-to-use interface, every single task moves along at a faster pace. Removing needless delays results in small bursts of increased efficiency across the board that add up in a very noticeable way over time.
Despite its laundry list of features, BuilderTrend doesn’t actually require you to completely change everything you’re doing. A variety of integrations are available—for example, Excel, Dropbox, and Quickbooks can all be managed through the BuilderTrend interface. Extensive tech expertise isn’t a prerequisite.
“I like that everything from scheduled, documents, purchase orders, budgets, etc. can all be in Buildertrend. It has many great features that streamline communication with trades and help them to get paid on time. It's a great way to organize multiple projects at a time.”
— Joshua H., user for 2+ years (source: Capterra)
Go here to schedule a demo and see first-hand what BuilderTrend is capable of.
Popular Pick for Landscaping Software: LMN (golmn.com)
Made for landscape companies
Priced at $197 - $397 monthly (view plans)
Used by 85,000+ companies across the US and Canada
It’s in the name—LMN was built specifically for landscape companies. Like BuilderTrend, LMN aims to provide an all-in-one solution for every part of an established landscape company:
Customer management. A comprehensive customer portal with credit card processing, file sharing, and many other features—to keep customers happy and in the loop.
Operations management. Scheduling & dispatching, live GPS tracking and routing, time tracking, and all other tools required to keep your company running like a well-oiled machine.
Growth management. Business forecasting and planning, sales and marketing reports, and a plethora of other features to help you keep expanding at your ideal rate of growth.
Included in LMN’s comprehensive landscape business management platform is a materials marketplace. Contractors have the ability to access materials from thousands of local manufacturers to find the right products at the best prices. $3.5B worth of materials were estimated last year on the platform, meaning it has real potential to streamline material acquisition for any landscape company, regardless of geolocation.
Unlike BuilderTrend, LMN charges a setup fee for new accounts. It’s natural to wrinkle your nose at setup costs—but keep in mind LMN is extremely expansive with regards to the features they offer. LMN implementation includes group training and 1:1 sessions, allowing you and your team to understand how to use the platform in general, and how to make the most out of it in regards to your specific company processes.
“We use this software for budgeting, job costing, estimating and time keeping. It works well with Quickbooks. We don't do any invoicing since we work mainly with large contractors, and our invoices come in the form of progress payment requests. Especially for the estimating department, it creates a consistent simple process to get the estimates out the door quickly. You can compare your estimate to your budgeted cost parameters to reduce mistakes, so it helps with the accuracy as well. We track our jobs won/lost and can use this data to make better decisions about how to bid. Time keeping is accurate and helps us put costs to the proper task and job. Overall, it has made our business run much smoother with consistent processes and analysis.”
— Laurie M., user for 2+ years (source: Capterra)
Go here to request a demo for LMN.
More software products for contractors looking to increase efficiency.
Although you can’t go wrong with BuilderTrend or LMN, plenty of other business management platforms for construction and landscape companies do exist.
The following platforms provide a slightly different approach. Depending on where you’re at in terms of size, growth goals, and how much you want to shake things up in your day-to-day operations, one of these platforms may suit you better in particular.
INCLUDE SOFTWARE
Include is a competitor of LMN. The key difference is that whereas LMN aims to connect all existing parts of your business processes, Include aims to replace them. For example, Include wants to move you away from a platform like Quickbooks and onto their in-house financial management platform. Such an approach requires a bigger upheaval of existing processes, but potentially allows for more streamlined workflows once everything has been switched over.
YARDBOOK
YardBook isn’t a direct competitor of Include and LMN—it’s significantly more limited in what it can do. In turn, the monthly costs are also significantly lower. A platform like YardBook can be a good starting step for landscape companies looking to optimize existing processes. If you like how your company is running with the help of YardBook, consider making the upgrade to Include or LMN down the line.
COMPANYCAM
CompanyCam is unique in that it focuses only on photo sharing and documentation for construction companies (rather than attempting to do everything at once). Like YardBook, CompanyCam can be a good first step towards optimizing your existing processes. (Despite dealing mostly with pictures, in the construction industry, just that one improvement can lead to very noticeable increases in efficiency throughout your organization.)
JOBBER
GetJobber services 50+ different industries, which means it isn’t built for construction or landscape companies in particular. If your company takes on a variety of projects across different industries, a more generalized platform may make more sense. You sacrifice a little bit of specialization in exchange for guaranteeing that each and every one of your projects can be managed in one place.
In the end, operations, profitiability, and marketing are all connected.
No matter which software solution is best suited for your exact company, the end result is the same—there are tools to help you manage your business and take your construction or landscape company to the next level. Yes, even your seemingly crazy business can be saved by the right software (as long as you and your whole team are committed to using it).
Are software solutions like these a hard and fast requirement and precursor to steady success and growth? We say absolutely. In fact, once you experience what life is like with a centralized business management platform, you’ll likely wonder how you managed to go so long without one (or, perhaps, the wrong one).
It’s true—the large majority, if not all, of the leading industry professionals we have the pleasure of working with at HALSTEAD operate their businesses using management software. We then work with them to implement marketing-related solutions such as call and form tracking, analytics, live reporting dashboards, etc, and then sync those tools to their CRM (customer relationship management) app. A lot of the tools we looked at in this article have built-in CRM functionality at their core, and we work to seamlessly sync contact forms to those systems using built-in functionality of API integrations.
But in addition to operations and marketing actually being linked together in terms of software apps, the disciplines are also closely connected. The right management tool can help leadership know their numbers in near real time—sales, expenses, profitability by service—you name it. And we see it all the time at HALSTEAD—clients who knows their numbers inside and out, appreciate and understand marketing budgets and expected ROI. Better profitably means proper marketing spends, means better results, better portfolios and clients, better employees, better work-life balance, and ultimately, better quality of life.
After all, isn’t that what it’s all about?