Setting Up Suprata for a Landscaping Company

There are two kinds of landscaping business. One bills per visit, starts every April at zero, and spends March cold-calling last year's customers to ask whether they're coming back. The other sells programs — a season plan, a year-round agreement — and starts April already knowing what it will make.

Same trucks, same crews, same lawns. The difference is entirely in how the work is sold, and it is the single biggest lever you have.

Suprata's landscaping setup is built around that. The wizard spends most of its effort on one step — turning what you charge into recurring programs you can sell — because that's the step that changes the business.

Before you start

Have these to hand. None take longer than a minute to find, and stopping mid-wizard to go and look is how people abandon setup.

Your season dates. First and last cut of a normal year. If you mow year-round, that's January to December and the wizard handles it.
Your mowing price. What you charge to cut an average residential lot, and what you charge for a big one. Rough is fine; you can change it in thirty seconds later.
Whether you plow. If you do, when your snow season starts and ends.
How many crews go out. One is a perfectly normal answer and the wizard expects it.

You do not need a customer list, a logo, or your accountant. Those come later and none of them block anything.

Which wizard you get

Accounts on a landscaping plan get the landscaping wizard — five steps, about fifteen minutes. Accounts on a general service plan get the standard ten-step wizard, which asks you to define business units, job terms and job types from blank boxes. That's the right shape for a commercial HVAC contractor with three divisions. It is the wrong shape for a two-truck lawn care outfit, and being marched through it is a good way to conclude the software isn't for you.

If you landed in the wrong one, there's a link at the bottom of every step to switch to the standard wizard — and contact support so we can fix the plan.

The five steps, and what each one actually builds

Step 1: Your business, and your season

Name, contact details, time zone, and the two date ranges that drive everything else: your growing season and your snow season.

These aren't cosmetic. Every program the wizard builds is stamped with a season window, which is what makes "Weekly Lawn Maintenance" a seven-month agreement in Vermont and a twelve-month one in Georgia. Set them to your real first and last cut — not the calendar quarters.

You also pick payment terms here. Net 15 is the right default for residential maintenance. Net 30 on a $45 mow means you're financing your customer's lawn for a month; due-on-receipt annoys people who pay by cheque. You can change it later under Settings.

Step 2: Your crew

In Suprata, work is dispatched to a crew, not to a person. That matches how a landscaping day actually runs — the schedule says "Crew 1 has eleven stops", not "Dave has eleven stops, and also Mike is with him".

One truck means one crew. Leave it at one and move on. Add more later when you add trucks.

Leave "put me on the first crew" ticked if you're an owner-operator. You can't be scheduled onto a job otherwise, which becomes confusing about ten minutes after you finish setup.

Step 3: What you do, and what you charge

Tick your services, type your prices. This becomes your price list, with every item prefixed LND- so you can find them all later in one search.

Put real numbers in. The defaults are plausible, not researched — they don't know your market, your fuel costs, or what the guy across town charges. The next step prices your programs directly off these numbers, so five minutes of care here saves you editing six contract templates afterwards.

Mowing stays ticked whatever you do. Every maintenance program is built on it.

The three "always added" items at the bottom deserve a word:

Crew labour, per man-hour. How every out-of-scope extra gets billed. Without it, the answer to "can you also take out that dead shrub?" is an awkward guess.
Debris disposal. The line that otherwise gets forgotten and eaten. Tip fees are real money over a season of cleanups.
Trip charge. Your minimum for a dispatched visit.

Step 4: Your programs — the step that matters

This is where the wizard earns its keep. Based on what you ticked, it offers up to six recurring programs and builds each one as a reusable agreement template with your prices already on it.

Program	What it is	Why you'd sell it
Weekly Lawn Maintenance	A cut a week through the season, billed per visit	The standard. Most customers expect it.
Bi-Weekly Lawn Maintenance	Every other week	What price-sensitive customers ask for first. Sell it rather than lose them — but read the growth note below.
Full-Season Maintenance Plan	Mowing, both cleanups, the feed program — billed in even monthly payments across the season	The one to push. See below.
Seasonal Snow Plowing	Flat price for the winter, however much it snows	Predictable for both sides. You get paid in a mild winter.
Per-Push Snow Plowing	Billed per event	Cheaper for them in a mild winter, dearer in a bad one. Offer both and let them choose.
Year-Round Property Care	Mowing in summer, plowing in winter, one monthly payment that never stops	The highest-retention thing you can sell.

Why the full-season plan is the one to push. A customer on per-visit billing sees a bill every week and does the arithmetic every week. A customer paying the same amount on the first of every month stops thinking about it entirely — which is exactly what you want, because the decision to cancel is a decision they now have to actively make rather than one that happens by drift in August. It also flattens your cash flow, so the June invoices aren't propping up the whole year.

Each program comes with contract wording already written — scope, scheduling, weather policy, cancellation, and for snow, trigger depth and the "we are not responsible for the irrigation heads you didn't mark" clause that saves an argument every single winter.

That wording is a sensible starting point, not legal advice. Read it once. Make it yours. Your state may require specifics ours doesn't cover.

Step 5: Review

Everything above is already saved — each step wrote as you passed it, so an interrupted setup is still a working one. This step just shows you what you've got.

After the wizard: selling your first program

The wizard builds templates. It doesn't sell them. Here's the whole sale:

Open the customer's account.
Add a service agreement.
Pick one of your new templates.
Set the visit schedule — every week, every two weeks, whatever you agreed.
Sign it (they can sign on your phone at the kerb, or you email them a link).

That's it. From then on the schedule creates the jobs, the jobs go to a crew, and the invoices go out on the shape you picked.

Why you set the schedule at the customer, not on the template. The same "Weekly Lawn Maintenance" template runs weekly for one property and fortnightly for another, and on Tuesdays for one and Thursdays for the next. Putting the cadence on the template would mean a separate template per combination, which is dozens of templates within a season. So the template carries the terms and the money, and each agreement carries the timing.

Getting existing customers onto programs

If you're migrating a book of business rather than starting fresh, do this in the off-season, not in May.

Work the list in this order:

Customers who already pay you every month. They're on a program in all but name. Converting them is a phone call and takes a minute each.
Your best seasonal customers. Lead with the monthly payment, not the total. "It's $310 a month April through October" lands very differently from "it's $2,170 for the season", and it's the same money.
Anyone who plows with you AND mows with you. These are your Year-Round Property Care conversions and they are the stickiest customers you will ever have.
Everyone else, as they come up for renewal.

Don't try to convert people mid-season. The pricing conversation is much easier when nobody is standing on a lawn that needs cutting.

Re-running the wizard

Until you finish it, you can go back to any earlier step and change an answer — prices, crews, which programs you want. It corrects what it built rather than building a second copy beside it, because everything it writes is keyed on something stable (the LND- codes, your crew names, the program names).

Once you finish it, it's done. The wizard doesn't reopen, and you shouldn't try to force it — it would create a second set of everything. After that, edit things in the places they live: Price List for prices, Service Agreement Templates for programs, Settings for company details.

Common mistakes

Leaving the default prices in. They're placeholders. A whole season of contracts priced off a number nobody checked is a painful thing to unwind.
Setting the season to calendar quarters. April 1 to September 30 isn't your season, it's a spreadsheet's idea of one. Use your real first and last cut or every agreement term is wrong by weeks.
Selling bi-weekly mowing at half the weekly price. A lawn cut fortnightly takes appreciably more than a lawn cut weekly — more growth, more clippings, sometimes a haul-away. Price it at roughly 60–65% of two weekly visits, not 50%.
Skipping the snow programs because it's June. Build them now while you're in setup. Selling snow in September to customers you already mow for is the easiest money in the business, and you will not want to be building contract templates that week.
Not marking obstacles before winter. Not a software mistake, but the snow contract wording protects you only if you actually did the walk-through. Do it in November.
Creating a job type per service. The wizard deliberately creates one per area — Lawn Maintenance, Seasonal Cleanup, Landscape Install, Snow & Ice. A crew chief picking from a list of eleven at 6am picks wrong.
Treating the contract text as final. It's a strong starting point written for a typical operation. Yours may not be typical.

What you can safely defer

You do not need any of this in week one:

Fertilization programs. Tick the service so the items exist; build the multi-step schedule when you actually sell one.
Irrigation. Two visits a year per customer — real money, but it can wait until spring start-up season.
Equipment and inventory tracking. Most crews under ten people never need it.
Automated payments. Worth doing before your first monthly billing run, not before your first job.