Finances

Lawn Care Business Expense Sheets

5 min read

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Tracking your lawn care business expenses is critical to understanding your financial health throughout the year. Lawn care business expense spreadsheets are a quick and easy way to record either monthly or periodic expenses associated with running your day to day operations. However, you have to know what to put on your expense spreadsheets for them to be effective tools, and this is what we'll outline below.

Understanding Lawn Care Business Expenses Spreadsheets

Commonly used to record business travel expenses; you can use an expense sheet for several different types of lawn care projects. Fees, lodging, food, and transportation are three common expenses.

For example, you can set up an expense sheet to track gas and mileage if the employee uses their own vehicle, or office supplies your employees buy. This will give you an accurate report of your costs, and this is essential for budgeting and tax reporting. If you have receipts for every expense you list in your report, it helps prevent mistakes like double claiming on taxes.

Ideally, you'll want to collect your expense reports from your employees on a monthly or weekly basis to prevent budgeting errors and ensure you're spending your money on the correct areas of your business. You can make your expense report as detailed and lengthy or as simple as you like.

You'll usually have an itemized list of all of your expenses with a short description for each one. To make it easier, you can sort your expenses into categories like meals, gas, mileage, or training. If you have a report specifically for each customer, it could include where your employee is going and the size of the property. You should also list and subtract any advance payments you make from your reimbursement amount.

A signature line is essential, and you’ll want to collect contact information for whoever requests a reimbursement. To keep accurate records, make sure every expense, advance payment, and reimbursement have clear dates.

Another use of expense sheets is to create a budget for your business. You can track your cash flow coming in and going out by week or month. This will give you a good idea of exactly where your money goes. This will also help you point out areas where you can cut costs and save your business money. Maybe it's more financially responsible to rent some equipment than buy it outright, or by the amount of repairs you can see that it's time to update your current equipment. An expense report can help you see all of these features that you might not have previously considered.

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What to Include in Your Lawn Care Business Expenses

We're going to outline popular categories and features to include in your lawn care business expenses spreadsheet. This way, you'll be able to see exactly why it's so important to have these sheets in your business. Each customer should have a sheet of their own to streamline the record-keeping process.

Lawn Care

Lawn care should have a category by itself. You should set up columns for the individual services, how many times a month, and the cost per service. Depending on how you choose to bill, you may total your expenses weekly or monthly. Under lawn care, you should have the following at the very minimum with a total row at the bottom:

Plant and Bed Care

The next section is plant and bed care, and you'll set up just like you did the lawn care one. There should be columns for the individual services, frequency per month, and a total cost column. Along the bottom below the services, you should have a total plant care cost row. This section includes:

Tree Care and Shrubs

If your company deals with tree care and shrubs, you should have a category for them as well. You set it up just like the other two, but your categories will include something like the following:

Finally, you can have a box for garden plants and seed planting if your business extends to them. There should be space for vegetables, flowers, trees, and shrubs.

It's important to track lawn care business expenses, and we've given you several great examples on how to set up your expense sheet. Try them and see which one works best for your business.

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