Landscaping company bookkeeping: seasonal revenue without seasonal surprises

Two businesses, one bank account

Maintenance and design-build behave nothing alike, so the first fix in most landscaping books is a divisional split. Maintenance is a route business: weekly mowing and garden care billed monthly, where margin lives in route density and crew productivity per stop. Design-build is a project business: quoted installs of patios, plantings, and sod, where margin is won or lost in the estimate and the plant order. We tag every sale and every cost to its division so each shows its own gross margin.

A blended margin hides real problems. Plenty of companies discover that profitable installs have been subsidizing a route priced three seasons ago — or that a glamorous design-build arm loses money once crew hours and disposal runs are charged to it honestly. Installs get a job card each: labour, plants and hardscape materials, equipment time, and dump fees against the quote. Maintenance gets costed per route and crew-day instead, because nobody job-costs a Tuesday of forty lawns.

Snow is billed monthly but earned by the season

A fixed-price seasonal snow contract billed in instalments from November to April is the classic deferred-revenue trap. The cash arrives evenly; the work does not. We recognize seasonal contract revenue over the contract term and hold prepaid or early-billed amounts as a customer liability, so a green December does not look like a windfall and a February of back-to-back storms does not look like a disaster. Per-push contracts are the opposite pattern — nothing is earned until the plow drops — so event logs and GPS records drive the invoice, and unbilled events at month end are receivables waiting to be lost.

Salt deserves its own line because its price swings and its usage is invisible unless someone logs it. Tracking tonnes purchased against applications keeps the de-icing margin real instead of averaged into the plowing number.

Equipment is the third crew

Mowers, trucks, trailers, plows, and skid steers each get per-unit treatment in our books: fuel, repairs, and insurance tracked by unit, with capital cost allowance running behind it — trucks in Class 10 at 30 percent, most equipment in Class 8 at 20 percent, both declining balance. The repairs ledger per unit is the replacement-planning tool: when a mower's annual repair bill approaches its resale value, the books have made the decision for you.

The repair-versus-capitalize call matters more here than most owners expect. A new blade set on an existing mower is a repair; a new mower is an asset; a plow package added to a truck is an addition to the truck's capital cost. We make those calls consistently, because a season of mislabelled purchases either overstates profit or wastes deductions — and fuel gets coded by unit as well, so the thirsty truck in the fleet identifies itself.

Financing is the winter problem. Equipment payments do not pause when revenue does, so we keep principal and interest split correctly and build a twelve-month view that shows whether the summer is banking enough to carry the loans through March. Buying US-built equipment adds border costs — duty, tariffs, and GST at import — which we cover in our cross-border guide for landscaping companies.

HST, seasonal payroll, and the close

Lawn care, landscaping, and snow removal are all fully taxable, and the $30,000 small-supplier threshold trips a growing solo operator faster than expected — often mid-season, which is the worst time to discover it. Registered companies should be capturing input tax credits on fuel, salt, plants, and equipment every month so the GST34 return is funded from clean numbers rather than a spring scramble.

Crews ramp up in April and wind down in November, so seasonal payroll and end-of-season ROEs are routine here, not exceptions. Receipts flow through Dext into QuickBooks Online, banks reconcile monthly, and the divisional statements land on a fixed schedule — the same disciplined close we describe on our bookkeeping services page, tuned for a business where half the year pays for the other half.