TreeBossPro Blog — Plant Health Care

Using the Plant Health Care Job Category to Separate PHC in Your Reports

Ask a tree company owner how much the PHC side made last year and you often get a pause. The revenue is mixed in with removals, pruning and storm work, the product costs are buried in the general supply account, and nobody is sure whether the spray truck pays for itself. Keeping plant health care in its own job category is the simplest way to answer that question honestly.

Why Categories Matter

Rescheduling PHC Visits When Weather Shuts You Down dealt with keeping rounds on track when the forecast turns. This article steps back to the numbers. TreeBossPro organizes work by job category: Removals, Trimming and Pruning, Stump Grinding, Plant Health Care, Storm and Emergency, and Consults. Every job you create lands in one of them.

That sounds like housekeeping, but it is what lets you see each part of the business on its own. Removals and PHC behave completely differently. Removals are big tickets, irregular and weather-driven. PHC is smaller tickets, repeated and planned. Blending them hides what is actually happening in each.

Setting Up PHC Jobs Correctly

Every spray round, injection, soil fertilization and insect or disease treatment should be a Plant Health Care job. Recurring PHC rounds set up once under the category stay there every time they come back. One-off treatments created from an estimate should be put in the category when they are created.

Consults deserve their own category too, even when they lead to PHC. Keeping consults separate lets you see how many site visits you do and how many turn into programs, which is one of the most useful numbers in a PHC business.

Storm and emergency work deserves the same discipline. A storm week can produce more revenue than a month of PHC, and if some of that lands in the wrong category, it makes PHC look far bigger or smaller than it really is.

What the Reports Show

With PHC in its own category, reports can show completed PHC work, revenue from plant health care, and how it compares to the rest of the company. You can see PHC revenue by month, which reveals how front-loaded your season is, and you can compare this year to last.

Pair category reports with the chemical tracking report and you have both sides of the PHC division: the money and the materials.

Seasonality becomes obvious once the data is separated. Many PHC divisions earn most of their revenue in a few months. Seeing that clearly helps with cash planning, hiring and deciding when to push prepayments.

Spotting Problems Early

Category data shows problems while they are still small. If PHC revenue in May is lower than last May, either rounds are behind, programs did not renew or prices did not keep up. Each of those has a different fix, and you want to know in May, not in December.

Unpaid invoices by category can also show whether PHC customers on per-round invoicing are paying slowly, which might argue for moving more of them to card on file and auto-billing.

Making Decisions With Real Numbers

Should you add a second PHC truck? Hire another applicator? Raise prices? Category reports give you the inputs. If PHC revenue is growing steadily and crews are booked full through the season, a second truck may make sense. If revenue is flat and crews have open days, the problem is sales, not capacity.

The same goes for pricing. Revenue per completed PHC job, combined with the amount used on application records, shows whether your prices cover material and time.

Category data also helps when talking to a lender, a partner or a potential buyer. A clear record of recurring PHC revenue over several seasons is far more convincing than a general sense that the program is doing well.

Keeping the Data Clean

Category reports are only as good as the categorization. Train office staff to put every job in the right category, and review a sample each month. A pruning job filed under PHC, or an injection filed under trimming, quietly distorts the numbers.

Clean categories are part of what makes TreeBossPro plant health care software useful for running the business, not just the schedule. Next: adding a PHC division to a company built on removals and pruning.

Category reports pair well with the chemical tracking report. One tells you what the division earned; the other tells you what it applied. Looking at both together is how you check whether pricing and material use are in balance.