In short
- Software pays for itself once admin eats a few hours a week or you take on your first employee.
- It has to handle repeat visits to the same gardens, with separate notes for each site.
- Test it with one real week of your own work, and let your staff judge the phone app.
When it starts paying for itself
Count the admin in an ordinary week. Copying details from the diary into a spreadsheet and then into the invoicing app. Answering calls from staff who can't find a gate code. Working out which visits happened before you bill. If that comes to a few hours, a monthly subscription costs less than the time it replaces.
The other trigger is your first employee. The notes in your head now have to live somewhere they can read them, and a group chat won't hold them for long. Our guide to organising a gardening business covers that step.
Five things it must do for a gardening round
Most job apps are built for plumbers and electricians, who visit a house once and move on. A gardening round sends you to the same gardens every week or fortnight, each with its own quirks. Check for these first.
- Clients with several sites. A landlord with four houses is one client with four sets of access, parking and green waste notes, and each house needs its own photos and visit history.
- Recurring visits that fill the calendar. Set up a fortnightly visit once, get dated jobs, and move one for rain without breaking the pattern.
- A phone app staff will use. The gate code and the note about the dog should be on the same screen as the address.
- Quote to job to invoice without retyping. An accepted quote becomes the job, and the finished job becomes the invoice.
- A price that doesn't punish growth. Per-user fees bite when you take on two seasonal staff in April. Fieldfare is £49 a month for the whole business, up to 99 users.
Fieldfare
Try it on your own round for 30 days
Test it with one real week
A feature table tells you a product has scheduling and invoicing. It won't tell you whether the two are connected, and that gap is where gardening businesses lose time. Skip the demo video and run your own week through the trial.
Use a real client with an awkward site, one of your recurring visits and the hedge reduction you quoted last month.
- Can you set up the client, site and recurring visit in a few minutes?
- Does the dated job show the right site notes on the phone?
- Can you move one visit without changing the whole pattern?
- Does the finished visit turn into an invoice without retyping?
Hand the phone to whoever does the visits
Ask your best member of staff to use the app for a day. If it's slower than a text from you, they'll stop opening it and your records will be out of date within weeks, so their verdict counts as much as yours.
On the Fieldfare app, each of Monday's jobs comes with the address, the gate code and the client's notes attached. Staff clock in, add photos and field notes, and mark the job done, and the hours they clock become their timesheet without anyone typing them up.
It doesn't take card payments or email invoices from the app. Clients pay into your own bank with no per-payment fees, and if you use Xero, QuickBooks or Sage, it reads the invoices and payments from there. If you also run build projects, see landscaping business software, and for a tool-by-tool comparison read our roundup of the best gardening software.
Before you sign up
Is free gardening software good enough?
For a sole trader with a handful of regular clients, it can be. Free tools tend to run out once you take on staff, and moving later means setting everything up again.
How many products should I trial?
Two or three at most. Any more and you won't have time to test each one with real work.
Can I bring my existing client list?
Most tools import from a spreadsheet. Fieldfare takes Excel or CSV, and you add sites and recurring visits from there. See CRM for gardening businesses for how to structure them.