How to Manage Landscaping Service Contracts with Increased Efficiency (Plus Free Template)

It’s become a common best practice for landscaping companies to set up service contracts with their customers. Namely, because service contracts allow you to lock in repeat business with existing customers, instead of constantly spending all of your time and energy on earning new business.

Landscaping business owners leveraging service contracts are finding they can simultaneously reduce costs and increase profits. 

Whether you’re focused on residential homeowners or commercial landscaping, it’s useful to have a standardized service contract template for customers to fill out when they opt-in for membership. 

But while a template is useful, it doesn’t solve the challenge of managing those memberships once they’re signed. And managing memberships is no small task.

For example, once a membership is signed, you need to: 

• Keep track of all relevant documents and customer information.

• Be on top of when each individual customer is due for their next service appointment.

• Schedule those service appointments and ensure customers are provided services on time.

• Manage the billing process so that all members are billed accurately according to their contract.

By trying to manage service contracts manually, it’s not uncommon for businesses to lose track of when follow up services are due, or make scheduling or billing errors, and lose customers in the process. 

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Below we describe how to use our landscaping service contract template, and then we explain how our landscaping business software helps companies manage their service contracts effectively and efficiently — and helps them retain a happy, recurring customer base.

In particular, we’ll cover our customizable service contract templates, as well as our features for efficient scheduling and timely and accurate billing.

Curious about how ServiceTitan helps you make the most of our service agreement template? Schedule a call to learn more about how our software can help realize the full potential of your customer membership program.   

How to Use Our Free Landscaping Service Contract Template

Our landscaping service contract template lets you collect the necessary information you need from customers who want to opt into a recurring service. 

Whether you’re an independent contractor or a medium to larger operation, it’s simple to fill out and it covers the important sections of an agreement.

The top section includes all the necessary fields for documenting relevant company and customer details including names, addresses, and contact information:

The middle section covers the details of service including the time frame for coverage, pricing, and a three-plan format so you can present options to your customers and prospects (which data has shown can drive more revenue):

Lastly, the bottom section offers additional services that customers could add to their contract, and lines for each party’s signature:

Our contract form template is free to download, and you can save and print individual copies so you have a new contract for every customer who needs one. 

Because it’s a PDF file, you can also fill out the agreement directly on the PDF, which helps make record keeping easier because it’s digitized (and you don’t have to worry about hard-to-read handwriting).

But while this printable landscaping and lawn care contract is a good first step, it still leaves service providers with the challenges of managing service contracts manually like we described above. 

So let’s look at how ServiceTitan’s lawn care software helps solve these issues below. 

How ServiceTitan Helps You Get the Most Value Out of Your Landscaping Service Contracts

Let’s take a closer look at these challenges, and then walk through how our service agreement software helps solve them. 

Below we discuss the following features and benefits:

1. Customizable Contract Templates

2. Easily Schedule Appointments

3. Automated Billing

4. Reporting and Managing Membership Performance

1. Customizable Contract Templates 

When you use ServiceTitan, your landscaping business gets access to customizable service agreement templates. 

These templates can be tailored towards your customers. 

For example, you can specify how many visits a customer should get in a calendar year, including what landscape services your team needs to perform during those visits. 

In the settings section of your ServiceTitan dashboard, you can set up several different membership types that best suit your needs. 

Let’s say you normally offer mowing as part of a larger lawn service contract, but several of your customers opt-out of that membership because while they want regular lawn mowing they don’t require other landscaping work (such as fertilization or decorative landscaping) at the same frequency. Instead of having to create that template from scratch every time a client asks for that agreement, you can create a custom membership that’s stored in ServiceTitan. 

Now you can offer that package to your clients, likely increasing the number of memberships you sell, because you’re offering what existing customers are asking for.

This is one of the big differentiators between ServiceTitan and other field service software platforms — our flexible templates are easy to change, so they can help your business adapt easily as business needs or customer needs change. 

Note: If you’re already using a landscaping contract program that you like, we can create customized templates that mirror what’s working for you while making it easier to manage those templates and your customers. Plus, we import all of your existing customer data into ServiceTitan so you don’t have to start from scratch.

With ServiceTitan, we also streamline appointments by letting you tie your maintenance visits to specific equipment in your inventory. 

Showing up to the job without the right tools is bad for you and frustrating for the client. Everyone’s time is wasted — and it can put your business behind schedule for an entire week. 

In ServiceTitan, you can map your services to the equipment needed to perform each job. You don’t have to worry about showing up to a job without all the right tools, because ServiceTitan tells you what tools are needed when you pull up the customer account.

With ServiceTitan, you can quickly contact your customers who are due for a specific service. If it’s reseeding season, you can reach out to your clients who bought reseeding services from you last year.

Plus, instead of having to reach out to each client individually, you can do it all at once, reducing the risk of missing clients or sending out multiple emails to one client. 

By offering customizable service agreements, ServiceTitan helps you increase revenue while decreasing the amount of manual work you need to do on the template management side. 

2. Easily Schedule Appointments

When managing your service contracts with our software, you get a quick view of which of your customers are up-to-date on their service appointments. 

From your ServiceTitan dashboard, click on the “Follow Ups” tab and choose “Recurring Service Events”. 

This list can be organized by Date, Customer, Service Type, Preferred Technician, Location (and more).

From there, you can schedule an appointment if a follow up is needed. 

When you schedule an appointment through ServiceTitan, you can leave notes and details about the scope of the job for your landscapers within the service order. That way everyone on your team knows what’s needed to get the job done correctly.

3. Automated Billing and Smart Renewal

Another significant part of managing landscaping service contracts is tracking your customer’s billing and contract renewal. 

Often landscaping services use makeshift in-house processes that rely on spreadsheets and other more passive tools. But this quickly becomes unscalable — and at its best is unreliable. 

Generally, these companies only have one or two people who know the ins and outs of their custom-built processes, which means if those go-to people are on vacation (or out sick) then it’s difficult for your landscaping service to operate. 

Plus, your growth is limited to what those one or two people can manage. 

With ServiceTitan, you can easily set up billing parameters for each customer — such as whether they’re billed monthly, yearly, or quarterly. 

When you’ve set the customer invoicing parameters, all you have to do is follow up if a customer doesn’t pay or if their credit card transaction doesn’t go through.

In ServiceTitan, you can review the status of all of your memberships, both paid and unpaid.

This means you can quickly see how much money you’re bringing in every month and if any of your clients are consistently behind on paying their invoices. 

Without an easy to manage billing tool like this, many landscaping services continue to work on delinquent accounts due to miscommunication between accounts payable and landscapers.  

Since ServiceTitan seamlessly integrates with QuickBooks, you can run a revenue recognition model.

ServiceTitan also has membership renewal protection — where we auto-update credit card expiration dates. This saves your landscaping business time because you don’t have to call customers to get updated credit card information. 

ServiceTitan’s automated billing structure is a win for you and your clients. By only reaching out to your customer to perform your landscaping services, you remind them of the value of your work, not the headache of paperwork or unpaid invoices. 

Plus, you don’t put your business — or the homeowners you’re servicing — at risk of having their usual service interrupted. 

4. Reporting and Managing Performance

Landscaping service contracts contain valuable information that is often underutilized by companies who are just manually collecting and storing their agreements. 

Our field service software lets landscapers look at data from what contracts do the best.

Specifically, you can focus on:

1. Customer memberships 

2. Recurring services

In short, you can see which services are really selling. 

You can analyze which services lead to the longest membership engagements, and which ones lead to the shortest. Often landscaping services don’t have a reliable way of validating which services are bringing them the greatest profits.

But ServiceTitan lets you see that information. 

If you’re looking to ramp up your marketing efforts, you can use this data to provide custom offers to your customers and use our Marketing Pro upgrade to send out email sequences tailored to get you more business.

Getting Started with Service Contracts in Our Landscaping and Lawn Care Software

If you haven’t already, follow the link below to get immediate access to our downloadable landscaping service contract. It’s a great first step for organizing your recurring landscape maintenance services. 

Click here to download the services agreement contract template PDF

But as we’ve described in this article, having a template is only a first step due to all of the other aspects involved in managing those contracts:

1. Keeping all contracts organized.

2. Tracking and scheduling appointments for recurring services.

3. Handling billing and payments.

4. Tracking performance and optimizing your maintenance contracts.

With ServiceTitan, you can easily do all of the above. 

Plus, ServiceTitan comes with many other features, such as our QuickBooks Integration and suite of marketing tools that allows you to scale up your landscaping services. 

Curious about how ServiceTitan can help you make the most of our service agreement template? Schedule a call to learn more about how our software can help realize the full potential of your customer membership program.