Mike Andes explains how to track actual hours against budgeted hours to find which mowing jobs need price increases. Collect a year of time-tracking data, run variance reports to spot problem jobs, then raise prices on the ones eating your margin. Tell crews the data helps them earn more too.
Mike, what's a good way to go about figuring out a P4P system based on budget hours versus actual time completed? Okay, good question. So you need to have software to do this and what you're talking, what this individual is talking about here, I don't have a name, sorry. Is asking about how to make a P4P system using budgeted versus actual hours. In other words, what I think the job is going to take versus how long it actually takes. You need to have a system for tracking that. And yes, you could do paper and be like, okay, I got there at 3:18 and then I left at 4:16. Like you could do that and then manually enter that into another document. Highly recommend you don't do that. Use a software that you can clock in and clock out and do time tracking and then run report and see the variance between actual time versus the budgeted time. And that's how you then can predict, okay, I need to add more budget hours, therefore I need to raise the price. And it's a great way to know which jobs are performing well, which ones are needing to be increased on price. And very, you know, doing your numbers and your price increases from a statistical reports perspective, instead of like, oh, I need more money, let's raise the prices on everyone. Being able to do that is really valuable. You need a good solid year of that data from your software showing punch ins, showing clock outs on every single job and seeing the variance. And trust me, it's not easy sometimes to get your employees to clock in and out of jobs. But when they're on P4P like you're talking about here, they want to make sure that you have accurate data so, so that you can raise prices so that therefore they can make more money because they have more budgeted hours on jobs. So we struggled for a long time with just trying to get the crews to punch in and out of jobs. And it got dramatically better when they were told like, look, we wanna raise prices on a third of our customers. And in order to do that we need clean data on punch in and punch out times so we can know the actual time versus the budget time. And we know how much to raise their price and who to raise their price. And so they got a lot better at it. And so that's helped a lot. But make sure you have a SOFTW system that can do that for you, save you a lot of time on time tracking.
