The first step is turning on the Projects feature in QuickBooks Online. Go to Settings, then select Business, then Projects, and flip it on. Once enabled, you can create a project for every job you take on. A patio install for the Hendersons, a weekly mowing contract for a commercial property, a full landscape redesign. Each one becomes its own bucket where expenses, labor, and income land so you can see profitability at the job level instead of just for the company overall.

Every expense needs to be assigned to a project at the time you enter it. When you buy pavers or mulch or plants at the supply yard, that receipt gets coded to the specific job it belongs to when you record it. Not at the end of the week. Not when your bookkeeper gets to it next month. At entry. The longer you wait, the harder it becomes to remember which job those three bags of topsoil were actually for. Material receipts are the most common thing landscapers let pile up, and it destroys the accuracy of your job cost reports.

Enable class tracking if you want an additional layer of organization. Classes work well for separating different types of work like residential maintenance, commercial contracts, and one-time install projects. This gives you reporting at both the job level and the service type level, which helps you understand which parts of your business are actually profitable.

Labor is the other big piece. If you or your crew are working on a specific job, those hours need to be assigned to that project. You can track time directly in QuickBooks Online or use a time tracking app that syncs with it. Without labor assigned to jobs, your cost reports only show materials and you are missing your largest expense category. A job that looks profitable based on materials alone might be losing money once you account for the 40 hours your crew spent on it.

Subcontractor invoices follow the same rule. If you bring in someone for irrigation work or tree removal, their bill gets coded to the project where the work happened. Same with equipment rental. Everything that touches a job should show up under that job.

The payoff for all this discipline is the estimate versus actual comparison. When you bid a job at $4,800 and you can see that materials came in at $1,200, labor was $2,100, and subs cost $600, you know exactly where you stand. You can see which jobs hit your margins and which ones didn’t, and more importantly you can figure out why. Maybe you’re consistently underestimating labor on hardscape installs or your material costs are running higher than what you’re quoting. You can’t fix what you can’t see.

If you’re not sure how to structure your chart of accounts or set up Projects in a way that matches how your landscaping business actually operates, that’s where working with someone experienced in job costing makes a real difference. The setup matters because a poorly organized QuickBooks file produces reports that are technically complete but practically useless for decision-making.

The system doesn’t need to be complicated. Create a project for every job, code expenses and labor to it when they happen, capture receipts immediately, and review your job cost reports regularly. Landscaping businesses that do this consistently know which jobs make money and which ones don’t. The ones that batch everything later or skip job coding entirely are guessing. As Dodge County bookkeepers who work with trades businesses regularly, we’ve seen the difference accurate job costing makes when it comes time to set next season’s pricing and decide which types of work are worth pursuing.