Track Route Profitability per Crew per Day

Route profitability per crew per day is the single number that tells a landscaping owner which routes earn money and which ones quietly drain it. The fastest way to find it: take a crew's revenue for the day, subtract their labor hours, drive time, and material cost, and compare the result across crews and routes side by side. Owners who track this weekly almost always discover that one or two routes carry the business while a third runs at a loss nobody noticed.

Monthly revenue hides this. A lawn-care company can grow top-line sales every season and still see margins shrink, because the new accounts that drove the growth sit at the far edge of the service area, where drive time eats the gain. Margin leaks in landscaping are operational, not financial: a crew that takes ten minutes too long per stop, a route sequenced so the truck crosses town twice, or a property bid at a price the market supported three years ago and never repriced. None of those show up in a profit-and-loss statement. They show up in the field, on a specific day, with a specific crew.

Why daily, and why per crew

A 26-week mowing season gives an owner roughly 130 service days. That short window is exactly why daily measurement matters: if a route is running thin, finding out in week three instead of week twelve recovers nine weeks of margin. Per-crew measurement matters because crews are not interchangeable. The same route run by a seasoned two-person team can be profitable, and run by a green crew can lose money on labor overrun alone. Averaging them together erases the signal you most need to see.

The four numbers that define route profitability

Route profitability per crew per day reduces to four inputs. Capture these and the math is simple subtraction.

• Route revenue: the sum of the day's billable service value for that route, not what was invoiced this month but what the day's work was worth.
• Crew labor cost: clock-in to clock-out hours times the loaded wage. Loaded wage adds payroll taxes and workers' compensation on top of base pay, which the U.S. Small Business Administration lists as required employer costs. As a rule of thumb, plan on a loaded cost of roughly 1.3 to 1.4 times base wage: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows benefits run close to 30 percent of total compensation for private-industry workers (Employer Costs for Employee Compensation).
• Drive and windshield time: the non-billable hours between stops and to and from the yard, costed at the same loaded wage plus fuel.
• Materials and disposal: mulch, fertilizer, fuel surcharge, and dump fees attributable to that route that day.

Route revenue minus the other three equals daily route margin. Divide that margin by billable man-hours and you get margin per labor hour, the comparison number that lets you stack a fertilization route against a mow-and-blow route fairly even though their revenue looks nothing alike.

A daily route scorecard you can run in five minutes

The framework that turns those four numbers into action is a one-row-per-route scorecard, filled in at the end of each service day. Call it the Route Margin Scorecard. Each row carries six fields: route name, crew, revenue, total cost (labor plus drive plus materials), daily margin, and margin per man-hour. Sort the table by margin per man-hour, descending.

The bottom three rows are your work. A route at the bottom is sending you one of three messages: the price is too low for the work, the route is sequenced inefficiently, or the crew is overrunning the time the job should take. The scorecard does not tell you which, but it tells you where to look, and that is most of the battle. Run it daily for two weeks and patterns separate the one-bad-day routes from the structurally unprofitable ones.

Margin per man-hour is the field that earns its keep. A route can post a healthy dollar margin and still rank near the bottom because it consumes too many labor hours to get there. Ranking by the per-hour figure surfaces the routes where your most expensive resource, crew time, is being spent at the lowest return.

A working example: the route that looked fine

Consider a seven-truck lawn-care operation in a mid-size metro running residential mow routes. On paper, all seven routes billed within a tight band, so the owner assumed they performed similarly. Two weeks of the Route Margin Scorecard told a different story.

Route 4 billed near the top but ranked last on margin per man-hour. The cause was geographic: a cluster of accounts added the prior spring sat 18 minutes past the rest of the route, so the crew logged nearly an hour of windshield time per day reaching them. Once the owner saw the per-hour gap, the fix was obvious. Three of the outlying accounts moved to a neighboring route that already passed near them, and the remaining two were repriced to cover the drive. Route 4's margin per man-hour climbed into the middle of the pack within a week, with no change to the crew or the equipment. The number had been there all season; nothing surfaced it until it was measured per crew, per day.

Turning the numbers into a habit

The scorecard only works if it gets filled in every day, which is why most owners who try this in a spreadsheet abandon it by midsummer. The data lives in three places that do not talk to each other: crew clock times, route billing, and the fuel-and-materials receipts. A dashboard that pulls those together so the day's margin appears without manual reconciliation is what makes the habit stick. MyDashBorg builds that view from a service-business template, so the four numbers land in one place and the bottom three routes flag themselves. The small-business dashboard templates cover route, crew, and margin tracking out of the box, and the "Ask your data" feature lets an owner type "which crew had the lowest margin per hour last week" and get an answer in plain language.

Capture four numbers, rank routes by margin per man-hour, and work the bottom three. Owners who run that loop weekly stop guessing which routes carry the business and start pricing, sequencing, and staffing against what the field is actually telling them.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does route profitability per crew per day actually measure?

It measures the daily margin a single crew generates on a single route after subtracting labor, drive time, and materials from the day's billable revenue. Unlike monthly revenue, it isolates the operational factors (overruns, drive time, stale pricing) that cause margin leaks. Tracking it daily lets owners catch an unprofitable route within weeks rather than at season's end.

Why is margin per man-hour better than dollar margin for comparing routes?

Dollar margin rewards routes that simply bill more, even if they consume disproportionate crew hours to do it. Margin per man-hour normalizes for the most expensive and most constrained resource a landscaping business has: labor time. Ranking routes by this figure surfaces where crew hours earn the lowest return, which is usually where the real problem hides.

How should I estimate my true labor cost per hour?

Start with base wage, then add payroll taxes and workers' compensation, which the SBA lists as required employer costs. A common rule of thumb is a loaded cost of about 1.3 to 1.4 times base wage, consistent with Bureau of Labor Statistics figures showing benefits at roughly 30 percent of total compensation for private-industry workers. Use your own benefit and tax rates if you have them, but the multiplier gets you close enough to rank routes honestly.

How do I track this without spending an hour a day on spreadsheets?

The data sits in three disconnected places: crew clock times, route billing, and fuel and materials receipts. Manual reconciliation is what kills the habit by midseason. A dashboard that pulls those sources into one daily view removes the friction, which is why most owners who succeed at this use a tool that automates the math rather than a fresh spreadsheet each day.

What should I do with the routes at the bottom of the scorecard?

A low-ranking route is sending one of three signals: the price is too low for the work, the route is sequenced so the crew loses time driving, or the crew is overrunning the expected time on each stop. Identify which by comparing the route's drive time and labor hours against similar routes, then reprice, resequence, or coach the crew accordingly. Re-run the scorecard for a week to confirm the fix landed.

Want this running without building it yourself? See how the plans fit your fleet on the pricing page.