How do I track labor costs for multiple crews working different job sites in my landscaping company?
The foundation is time tracking by job. Every crew member logs their hours against a specific job site or customer every single day. Not at the end of the week, not from memory on Friday afternoon. Daily logging is what makes the data reliable. Set up each job site or customer in QuickBooks Online so time entries have somewhere to land. When a crew member clocks in at the Smith residence and clocks out four hours later, those hours get tagged to that job. Do this for every site, every day, across all your crews.
Pick a time tracking tool that integrates with QuickBooks Online. QBO Time (formerly TSheets) is built into the QuickBooks ecosystem and works well for field crews with its mobile app. Jobber and Service Autopilot are popular with landscaping companies because they handle scheduling, dispatching, and invoicing alongside time tracking. All three sync time entries directly into QBO so you avoid manual data entry and the errors that come with it.
Use the burdened labor rate when calculating costs, not just the hourly wage. If you pay a crew member $20 per hour, your actual cost is higher after employer payroll taxes, workers’ comp insurance, paid time off, and any benefits. For most landscaping companies in Phoenix, the burdened rate runs 25% to 40% above the base wage. A $20/hour employee actually costs you $25 to $28 per hour. Use that real number or you’ll consistently think you’re making more money than you are.
Have the crew lead verify time entries before they sync each day. Mistakes happen. Someone forgets to switch jobs when they move sites. Someone clocks in late and guesses their start time. Catching these errors the same day is straightforward. Catching them two weeks later is pure guesswork.
Once time entries flow into QuickBooks tagged to the right jobs, you can pull reports showing labor cost per job site. Compare that number to what you originally bid for the labor portion. If you bid 10 hours of labor for a weekly maintenance account and your crew consistently logs 12, you’re losing money on that account even if the total contract looks fine on paper. This is essentially job costing applied to landscaping, and it changes how you price future work.
This comparison also reveals which crews are most efficient. If Crew A finishes similar jobs faster than Crew B, you can investigate why. Better route planning? More experienced workers? Different equipment? The data gives you something concrete to manage instead of relying on gut feelings about who performs well.
Track drive time separately from on-site time. Travel between job sites is a real cost, but lumping it into per-job labor numbers makes jobs look unprofitable when the actual problem might be poor routing. Separate tracking lets you address each issue on its own.
The system doesn’t need to be complicated. It needs to be consistent. The landscaping companies that actually know their numbers are the ones where daily time logging by job site is a non-negotiable habit, not something that gets skipped when things are busy. If you need help getting this set up in QuickBooks and making sense of the reports, Phoenix bookkeepers who understand field service businesses can configure the whole system and show you how to read the profitability data that comes out of it.
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