Accounting for Landscapers.

Your Truck and Trailer

You can write off your truck two ways. One is a flat rate per mile. The other is what you really spend on gas, tires, repairs, and insurance.

Most preparers pick the mileage rate. Why? It is less work.

A truck pulling a loaded trailer all day burns through fuel and tires. Actual costs often save you more. Your trailer is equipment in its own right, with its own write-off. So we run both methods first.

Your Equipment

Mowers, blowers, trimmers, aerators, a skid steer. These are not supplies. They are equipment, and equipment has its own rules.

Smaller pieces can often be written off the same year you buy them. Big ones can too, under a rule called Section 179.

Here is the California catch. California caps that write-off far below the federal limit. A big machine can come off your federal return in one year and your state return over several. Your books have to track both.

Your Crew

This is the expensive one.

California has a rule most owners never hear about. Labor Code 2750.5 says that to be a real subcontractor on licensed work, the person has to hold the license himself.

Which landscaping work is licensed? In California, any job worth $1,000 or more in labor and materials needs a contractor's license. Installs like irrigation, hardscape, retaining walls, and lighting fall under the C-27 Landscaping license. Regular paid maintenance, like mowing and pruning, generally does not.

So a worker on your install jobs who doesn't hold a C-27 is not a sub. He is an employee, whatever the two of you agreed. Workers on maintenance routes face a different test, but most crew members who show up when you say and use your equipment end up as employees under that one too.

Why does that matter? If you paid them on a 1099, the back taxes and penalties land on you.

We tell you which one each worker is, and we file the 1099s for your real subs. We do not run payroll.

Maintenance Routes vs Install Jobs

A weekly maintenance account and a backyard install are not the same business.

One pays the same every month and you can plan around it. The other pays big, takes weeks, and eats materials. Put both in one bucket called revenue and you cannot tell which one is feeding you.

We split them. Then you can decide whether to chase more installs or build more routes.

Your Field Software

Jobber and similar apps pay you in batches. One deposit covers a dozen maintenance visits, minus fees.

That deposit will never match an invoice. So it gets forced, or dumped in a bucket called uncategorized. By December nobody knows what is real.

We match every deposit back to the jobs inside it, every month.

Your Slow Months

Rain stops installs. Some months the maintenance accounts are all that's coming in.

The IRS still wants its estimated tax payments every quarter. Estimated taxes are the payments you make during the year, because nobody withholds tax from your income. Miss them and you owe a penalty on top of the tax.

There is a safe harbor. Pay in at least as much as last year's tax, in four installments, and the penalty goes away even if you owe more in April. We figure your number so a slow winter doesn't turn into a penalty.