GreenMargins FAQ

GreenMargins, job costing and margin software for landscaping contractors, calculates the true cost of a job (labor burden, travel time, materials, disposal, overhead) and shows the margin before the quote is sent. It is aimed at the costs that never reach the invoice: the burden stacked on top of a wage, the drive there and back, the tip fee, the share of the truck payment the job should carry.

It is the layer before the work is billed, so it does not invoice, take payments, or run payroll. Those stay wherever they are now.

Yes, AI voice quoting is built in. Record (or type) a short job recap right after the site visit, and AI builds the draft quote: it detects the service, fills the scope questionnaire, enters your hours, matches materials to your own price catalog, and selects your crew and vehicle.

A live coaching checklist shows what you haven't covered while you talk, and one round of follow-up questions catches anything missing. It's included on every plan: 25 AI quotes during the trial, 1/month on Free, 3/month on Starter, 150/month on Team, 400/month on Pro.

No. The AI only extracts what you said. Every price comes from your own data. Materials match against your catalog with your stored cost and markup, labor uses your crew's burdened rates, travel is calculated from the customer's address, and overhead comes from your settings.

If the AI can't match something you dictated to your real data, it becomes a follow-up question instead of an invented number, and you review every value before the quote goes out.

Yes. The 14-day free trial opens the whole product: the full cost engine, AI voice quoting (25 quotes), and up to 3 users. No credit card required to start.

You can create unlimited quotes, set up your labor rates, build custom services, and see your real profit margins.

When the trial ends, you move to the Free plan automatically (3 quotes a month, 1 crew, prebuilt services) and your data stays untouched. There is no read-only lockout and no hard paywall. Upgrade anytime to lift the limits.

Yes. Every paid plan comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee: if you're not satisfied within 30 days of your first payment, contact support for a full refund.

Between the 14-day trial (no card), the Free plan you keep afterward, and the guarantee, there's no point where your money is at risk while you evaluate GreenMargins.

Plan on 15-30 minutes for first setup. The onboarding wizard walks you through:

• Entering your labor rates and burden percentages
• Setting your overhead costs
• Configuring travel/vehicle costs
• Selecting which prebuilt services you offer

The parts that take longest are the two you should not rush: your real burden percentage and your real overhead per billable hour. Get those wrong and every quote after them is wrong by the same amount.

Yes. Starter is a single-user plan and Free is too, so a one-person operation is not paying for seats it will never fill.

Working solo does not remove the burden problem, it hides it. Your own hour still carries self-employment tax, insurance, the truck, and whatever you are putting away for the winter. If you price off the wage you would pay someone else to do the work, you are paying yourself last and calling it profit.

GreenMargins is from $47/mo USD. The whole thing in one table:

Annual billing is charged as $566, $950 and $1,910 a year. The $47, $79 and $159 figures are those totals divided by twelve and rounded to the dollar, which is why they do not multiply back exactly. Every plan, including Free, runs the full cost engine and job closeout, because the margin math is the point. What the paid tiers buy is volume and reach: more users, more custom services, outbound webhooks on Team and Pro, the REST API on Pro, and deeper Profitability Insights (none on Free, basic on Starter and Team, full on Pro). Off-season, hibernate is $15/mo read-only for up to 4 months a year.

If you cancel your GreenMargins subscription, you have 30 days to export your data (quotes, customers, services) via CSV download. After 30 days, your account data is permanently deleted.

Alternatively, you can hibernate your account for $15/month during the off-season (read-only, up to 4 months a year). Your data stays intact and you can reactivate when busy season returns.

GreenMargins calculates true labor burden by adding employer costs to base wages:

• Payroll taxes. The employer share of Social Security and Medicare is 7.65% of wages (IRS Topic 751, checked August 2026)
• Workers compensation. Rates are set by state and class code, and landscaping is not a cheap one. Get your actual rate off your policy rather than a number off the internet, because the spread between states is wide enough to change a bid
• Health insurance contributions
• Paid time off costs
• Any other benefits

Illustrative example, using your own numbers in the product rather than these: at a 40% total burden a $25/hour wage costs you $35/hour on the job. Enter the burden percentage once and GreenMargins applies it to every quote, so the rate you price at is the rate you actually pay. You can work yours out in the labor burden calculator first if you want to see the arithmetic.

Honest answer: we are not going to hand you an industry average, because we have no survey behind one and the number that matters is yours, not the trade's.

What we can tell you is the mechanism. A margin looks healthy right up until the costs that never reach the invoice come out of it: burden on top of the wage, the drive there and back, the tip fee, the share of overhead the job should carry. A job priced at what feels like a comfortable margin can land near zero once those are counted, and you only find out at year end. Set your own target, then check every quote against it before you send it. We have a longer piece on what profit margin landscapers should charge.

GreenMargins shows your exact profit margin in real-time as you build each quote. It calculates:

• Revenue: What you'll charge
• Direct costs: Labor burden × hours, materials, disposal, subcontractors
• Indirect costs: Travel time, overhead allocation
• Net profit: In dollars and percentage

If a job shows 8% margin when you need 20%, you know to adjust pricing before sending the quote.

GreenMargins calculates travel time costs automatically. Enter your shop address and the job site, and it uses Google Maps to pull distance and drive time.

Then it applies your crew's burdened labor rate to that drive time, plus vehicle cost per mile. Worked example: a 30-minute drive with a 3-person crew at a $35/hour burdened rate is $52.50 of labor before fuel. On a $900 job that is 5.8% of the price gone before a shovel moves, and it is the line most estimates leave out entirely. The travel time calculator will price a specific run for you.

GreenMargins calculates overhead automatically. Enter your monthly fixed costs (truck payments, insurance, software, storage, phone, marketing) and your estimated billable hours per month.

GreenMargins divides total overhead by billable hours to get your overhead rate, then applies it to every quote. Worked example: $3,000/month overhead over 160 billable hours = $18.75 of overhead per hour worked. The trap is the denominator. Billable hours are not clocked hours, and if you use the bigger number your overhead rate comes out too low on every job of the year. The overhead calculator runs the same math with your figures.

Yes. GreenMargins includes closed-loop profitability tracking. After completing a job, enter your actual hours worked and materials used.

It then shows the variance line by line, so you can see whether you lost the margin on hours, on materials, or on disposal. Closeout works on every plan including Free. What is tiered is how deep the reporting goes on top of it: none on Free, basic on Starter and Team, full on Pro. Over a season that is how you find out which service you are quietly subsidising, which is usually not the one you would guess. See how to tell whether a job was profitable.

For a 1 to 10 person crew whose problem is pricing rather than paperwork, GreenMargins is a strong fit: it is built for job costing rather than scheduling or CRM, and it shows your margin on every quote before you send it. The 14-day trial takes no card, so you can test it on jobs you have already quoted.

We go through the customer-facing proposal tools separately in our roundup of quoting software for small landscaping businesses. Where GreenMargins is the wrong tool:

• Need dispatch, client messaging and getting paid? That is Jobber. GreenMargins does none of the three.
• Past roughly $1M with office staff? Aspire and LMN go deeper. Aspire's per-property profitability reporting is deeper than ours, on our own reading of it, and Aspire is quote-only so we will not publish a price for it.
• Bidding commercial work off architectural drawings? You want takeoff software, not this.
• Pricing already set and working? Do not buy software for a problem you do not have.

Jobber is field service management: scheduling, dispatch, client communication and invoicing, with quoting attached. GreenMargins is the cost engine underneath a quote.

What GreenMargins puts in the estimate:

• Burdened labor, not the base wage
• Drive time and vehicle cost priced from the job address
• Materials markup off your own catalog, plus disposal
• Overhead allocated per billable hour
• Live gross profit and margin as you build the quote

Jobber is much broader. GreenMargins does not invoice, take payments, message clients or run payroll. And Jobber's Grow and Plus plans advertise job costing of their own, so if you want one tool for the whole lifecycle, look there first. Jobber lists Core at $49/mo, Connect at $139/mo, Grow at $199/mo and Plus at $499/mo, all USD on a one-year commitment billed monthly (verified August 2026).

Plenty of contractors run both: Jobber for the schedule, GreenMargins for the pricing. If you would rather read the long version, we compare them on the Jobber alternative page.

LMN is built for larger companies with office staff and crew time tracking. GreenMargins is built for 1 to 10 person crews that want the costing math without the rest of the system.

LMN Starter lists at $297/mo and LMN Professional at $648/mo, each marked as being after a one-time onboarding fee (verified August 2026). Two caveats on those numbers, because you should not have to take our word for them: the onboarding fee amount is not printed on the page, and the page sits on granum.com rather than LMN's own domain, because golmn.com/pricing now 301-redirects there. No currency is stated. GreenMargins is from $47/mo USD billed annually, $59 month-to-month.

Where LMN wins: past roughly 5 office staff or 15 field crew, or if you need GPS crew time tracking, LMN is the right answer and we are not. That threshold is our own read on where the two tools separate, not LMN's. See our LMN comparison for the full breakdown.

It can, and here is what it adds over a sheet:

• Automatic labor burden calculation
• Real-time profit margin display
• Travel time and distance costing
• Materials markup tracking
• Professional quote PDF generation
• Customer management

Unlike a spreadsheet, it keeps your service templates and quote history in one place instead of in copies of a file, and a formula cannot get overwritten in one row and not the next.

A sheet you have already tuned and trust is not automatically worse, and if your pricing is set and working you may not need to switch at all. The parts a sheet will not do on its own are pulling drive time from the job address, holding markup steady as supplier costs move, and comparing actual hours back against what you estimated. Our spreadsheet alternatives guide walks through when the switch is worth it.

GreenMargins includes prebuilt service templates covering:

• Lawn care: Mowing, edging, fertilization
• Landscaping: Planting, mulching, bed maintenance
• Hardscaping: Patios, walkways, retaining walls
• Seasonal work: Spring cleanup, fall cleanup, snow removal
• Specialty: Irrigation, lighting, tree care

You can also build custom services with your own pricing formulas, labor estimates and material requirements. Those are capped by plan: 1 on Free, 5 on Starter, unlimited on Team and Pro. The prebuilt templates above do not count against the cap.

Yes, by CSV. Export name, address, email and phone from whatever you use now, upload the file, and map the columns.

Bring the addresses over even if the rest is messy. The address is what Google Maps prices drive time and distance against, so a customer record without one costs you the travel line on every future quote for that property.

GreenMargins is a web application. You can create quotes, check customer history, and log actual hours and materials against a finished job from a phone browser.

There is no native iOS or Android app to download, and nothing works offline. If your crews park in valleys with no signal, that is a real limitation and you should know it before you buy. You log in at app.greenmargins.com.

The complete list, in full:

• Google Maps, on every plan, for address lookup and drive-time costing
• Inbound lead webhooks, on every plan, to pull leads in from your site or forms
• Outbound webhooks, on Team and Pro
• REST API, Pro only, reading and writing quotes, customers and services (docs at app.greenmargins.com/api-docs)

That is all of it. There is no QuickBooks, Xero, Zapier or Make connector, and you will not find GreenMargins in their app directories. The outbound webhooks and REST API do work with the generic webhook and HTTP modules in tools like Make and Zapier, so quote data can reach your accounting system or CRM as a build-it-yourself workflow, by hand, or through your own code.