The short answer is both, but the emphasis depends on the type of work you’re doing. Most landscaping companies have a mix of recurring maintenance and one-time projects, and those two revenue streams call for different tracking approaches.

For recurring maintenance like weekly mowing, trimming, and blowing, tracking by client makes the most sense. There’s no distinct “job” to measure. The question you need to answer is whether each client relationship is profitable over time. If you’re sending a crew to a commercial property every Tuesday for $400 a month, you want to know what that route actually costs in labor and fuel so you can tell whether the account is worth keeping or renegotiating.

For project-based work like landscape installations, hardscaping, irrigation systems, or major redesigns, tracking by job is essential. Each project has its own materials, labor hours, subcontractor costs, and margin. A $15,000 patio installation might look great on the top line but lose money once you account for the extra trips, material overruns, and subcontractor markups. You won’t know that unless you track costs and revenue at the job level.

QuickBooks Online handles this well if it’s configured correctly. You can set up clients as customers and then create sub-customers or projects underneath them for individual jobs. Recurring maintenance revenue posts to the client level. Project revenue and costs post to the specific job. This gives you both views without duplicating data. A QuickBooks ProAdvisor in Chandler can help get this structure set up so your reports actually tell you something useful.

The tracking method also affects how you evaluate your crew efficiency and routing. If you only track by job, you lose sight of which ongoing clients are dragging down your margins. If you only track by client, you can’t see whether your installation work is actually profitable or just generating revenue that gets eaten up by costs.

One thing landscaping companies often overlook is tracking revenue by service type alongside client or job tracking. Knowing that maintenance generates 40% margins while installations generate 15% changes how you allocate your crew’s time and where you focus your sales efforts. This kind of insight becomes possible when your books are structured for how home and property service businesses actually operate, not just set up with generic categories.

Start with the basics. Make sure every invoice is tied to a client and, for project work, tied to a specific job. Make sure costs follow the same structure. Once that foundation is in place, the reporting will show you where your money is actually being made and where it’s leaking out.