[Lawn Lad]

Does anyone keep track of the number of working days in a year? What do you do with this information? Do you count up or count down?

Do you set goals using working days? For example, we should have X revenue, or gross profit at this point of the year. Do you give feedback to your crews based on where you are in the season relative to goals?

We have 160 working days from April 1 through November 9th in our market, excluding holidays and weekends. If we can start early or work later, we get more days. If I set my budget to 160 days, but can get more days out of a year, great. If we get rain, or get cut short, I know I need to work Saturday's.

How have you guys used working days in your business to plan out your production work?

[Mac]

Doug, in the recent issue of LM, they had an article about dashbaord reports... I think revenue billed vs. revenue required, on a daily basis, is a great one to add to the list they have. As they said, when you track this info on a frequent basis, you can make alterations to the plan on the fly to keep you financially on track to achieve your goals. If you want to take it a step further, Id also suggest tracking expenses on a daily basis too since rev and exp directly effect your NET.

[Lawn Lad]

MAC - thanks for sharing about the article, here is the link to it for anyone else. http://www.landscapemanagement.net/l....jsp?id=406047

This is a concept we've been working at refining, and I'm hoping this is the year. We have the systems to provide the regular updated information. As the push to make sure it happens I bought a dry erase board for the common office area where we are going to post our goal and actual numbers.

I'm not sure exactly which numbers to put up there and what is most important for us to look at on a weekly basis. Certainly budget to actual for a time period (last two weeks, or one week) but also an accumulated total to date.

Production labor hours, non-billable hours and total hours actual to budget. Also some sales numbers, I'm not sure if I'll break them down by category or do an aggregate. Probably an aggregate, but I might print it out on paper and post the more detailed numbers. What I'm looking for are those two or three key indicators that I can put up on the dry erase in big numbers that you can see from 15' away, numbers that will remind, motivate and mean something. Lots of ratios and data may be helpful when drilling down to some level of detail, but that can be distracting on daily basis.

We're new using QXpress this year, so getting numbers and information should be closer to real time if we get our work from the previous day in on a timely basis. But since we're not sure how we're going to use QXP yet and what we can do with it, I'm just a little uncertain.

I'm sure to some degree it will sort itself out this year, but it would be nice to have all the answers up front. Even if I did, it's a process, and I know it's going to change again anyways.

[cutntrim]

I've been slogging through entering 2006 log sheets into QB Contractor over the past couple weeks. We fill out individual daily paper log sheets tracking hours with columns for:

Customer Job
In
Out
Total (time)
Service Item/Description/Notes

From that I have customers broken down into Commercial/Residential, Summer/Winter and services broken down into subheadings under Winter Maintenance, Summer Maintenance, or Landscaping depending on what service is performed. (ex. "Summer Maintenance: Fertilizing").

In addition to our regular paying customers I've also got "Load/Unload", "Equipment Maintenance", "Dump Trip", and "Non-Productive"under the "Customer JOb" drop-down list.

I'll probably tweak them a bit since all of those are technically "non-productive" activities (or non-billable if you will) but that's how I've got it set up so far.

Real-time reports have been just a pipe dream so far, as I'm the one entering the data and this is the third year it hasn't gotten done until just before the next spring season rolls around.

My mom retired from the bank and I've asked if she'd like to take the data entry over from me so it can be done weekly. It'll allow current reports, save me time that I can spend in the field instead, and put some extra $ in her pocket.

Incidentally, as far as quick numbers to illustrate the importance of controlling non-billable time, when I call up a QB report on it we're frequently between 27-30% time spent NOT onsite producing billable work. Tells me I've got a lot of work to do to improve that. I'd like to see it at 20%.

[Stonehenge]

We start at about the same, 160 work days, but factor in rain days, equipment repair and warranty work (plant replacements, etc). With all that we get down to about 145 work days per year.

My "system" isn't much of a system; I simply keep in my head where we need to be at the end of any given day on a project to stay on track with my projections.

I'd like to start doing more non-billable hours tracking, and task tracking for each project, such as load time, drive time, etc.

[Lawn Lad]

Since so much of reporting begins with collecting information in the field, I'll share a couple of our forms we use. I don't like how much paperwork we do, but I feel we do get good information from it. But, timeliness has been our problem when pulling it all together to make the information useful. I am looking for a way to simplify my paperwork, but I think that will in part depend on how I sell/invoice my jobs as well.

Our guys, regardless of crew or time of year, always fill out a 'Payroll Time Sheet'. This is a break down for each individual as to how their time was spent. The times are then entered into a spread sheet for payroll reporting purposes, the information lines right up with the time sheet. There is room for eight crew members. Each crew fills out their own time sheet, so very rarely do all the columns (one for each guy) get used.

Each crew submits their paperwork for the day to our supervisor who assembles it with receipts, checks it and then puts it into a daily folder which gets submitted to the office for processing. Maintenance crews report their billable activities on type of sheet while installation and project related work gets reported on a different type of sheet which has room for material, equipment and labor break downs. For payroll reporting purposes the installation or enhancment crew may bill their travel time to the job, in which case they will have very little or no non-billable travel time. Where as mainteannce is invoiced curbside (not portal to portal).

[Lawn Lad]

The 'Payroll Time Sheet' has both billable and non-billable time broken down. Since we input into a payroll spread sheet (one new file for each payroll period - each person has their own worksheet in the file), we do a production summary for the payroll period that tells us total man hours by each category. We then export/link the data to a file we do call 'Dashboard' which gives us a progressive total on hours by category matched to revenue. So we are able to determine our realization rate by week, by service type. We track maintenance, enhancments, turf care and installation as our four revenue categories. We used to just do maintenance and installation, but I wanted to break out the turf care and enhancements so we could focus no developing the business and set specific sales goals for it. So we now track it separate.

One of the harder things for me to do when figuring out our realization rate or the value of work we've completed to date is the Work in Progress (WIP). For construction jobs that stretch several weeks or months, I generally wait until the end of the job to do my final numbers. This is frustrating since we don't have accurate numbers during that period of time, and then it seems as if we're regularly doing a job like this, so we never have all the up to date data.

I've tried to estimate values to plug them in, but since I don't believe them or have faith in them, I tend to ignore or not do it.

When I'm dong my final job cost I'll look at a job and take total man hours by the total amount invoiced (contract plus change orders) and come up with a value per man hour. I then go back over each day we worked and apply the value to each day's labor to get a value for that day's work.

I'm not sure that taking this realization rate and applying it to each day's work is the best method, but I've not come up with another one that makes sense. We could spend 20 hours on site one day and get a bunch of excavation or base preparation done. When the brick arrives and we lay brick, on which day do I apply the materials to the job? I could subtract materials out of the rate, but somewhere I have to add them back in for value on particular days. We do make money on materials, so I need to account for that value on the job in some way. So using man hours seems to be the best way, but maybe not.

How have you guys handled WIP and reporting?

[cutntrim]

WIP is/has been a non-issue for me because I don't have any construction work that takes weeks or months to complete.

I sit for hours and hours with a kink in my neck entering time sheets so that I can re-price maintenance properties that aren't profitable, and so I can bang my head against the wall when I see all the time wasted loading and unloading, travelling between properties, and fiddling around with equipment delay problems.

With construction jobs I'm trying to track how long tasks take within each job and then be able to use that info to better estimate the labour hours on future estimates. It seems I invariably underestimate the time needed to complete almost every installation job that we do and that is a source of constant frustration. When each new job is new and different it can be tough to accurately estimate labour, but I'm starting to do jobs similar to ones I've done before so eventually I'll start to improve my accuracy in bidding.

[trees]

I put in a hell of a lot of time over the last couple months looking at production numbers and the like. We're using per day production goals for each of our crews as part of their monthly incentive program. Each crew, planting, construction and details has their own average daily production goal each month, as well as the landscape division as a whole.

I looked at a whole lot of previous jobs to come up with production values for our most common tasks and put them into a moderately complicated excel sheet for estimating. That sheet is given to the foremen when they start a job and they will track their times on each task to try and stay within the hours alotted.

In terms of tracking production, I think that daily rates are important, but that is really more of a function of how well you have gotten your hourly production estimates figured. That said... it's a whole lot easier to track daily production in any kind of coherent fashion and if those numbers start to come up funny go back and check the job sheets for where the hours are being burnt.

[Mac]

In my short time as an employer, Ive become veeery shy of letting anyone know much about revenue goals/actual per day, week, etc. Further, you are running into complications with your COGS when basing your targets strictly on revenue. Yes, it is good... however it isnt the real COST DRIVER. (a fun accounting term if you want to google it)

Instead of looking at your revenue per day, why not break your whiteboard target into hours per day? If you have $1600 worth of work to be done on a given day, you will know that if your cew comes in at or below 40 hours (hypothetical $40/mhr) you met or exceeded your goals. This way, your guys have a tangable goal that actually makes sense to them. Additionally, your WIP reporting will become much simpler, as long as you know how long you estimated for each stage of an install. Finally, you wont have to account for COGS.

[Mac]

To add to the whiteboard reporting idea, this then becomes the basis for a tangible bonus system where you can keep tally of the hours under budget per monht/whatever time period and then issue a bonus based on this surplus time.

[Lawn Lad]

As a follow up, we've been working on our production budget and working it in man hours. The financial goals I'll share since I don't feel I have much to hide here, the expenses are there as well. And since the guys can affect both, they can see them.

The "daily" numbers I see working with:

Total payroll hours versus budget to date
Total non-billable hours relative to budget
Total billable hours by major revenue category (maintenance, construction, etc.).

I think we'll also put up a number on new enhancement sales with a weekly goal of X. So if we have a season long goal of up selling $3,000 per week for the first 25 weeks of the season - we can see where we stand on our goal of adding $75,000 more in enhancement sales. I'll probably show this a sold to date versus budget to date number.