WageTime is payroll for landscaping and lawn care companies: $50 a month per company plus $8 per person actually paid that month, with unlimited runs. The December roster of six costs $98; nobody bills you for the twenty you’ll rehire in March. Weekly pay day costs nothing extra, per-yard pay runs with the blended overtime math built in, and crew hours arrive GPS-stamped from the properties instead of a Thursday-night re-key.
Landscaping payroll isn’t hard because any one paycheck is exotic. It’s hard because the roster, the hours, and the pay method all change with the season, and generic payroll prices and behaves like it’s February all year.
Paying the mow crew per lawn is a great productivity deal right up until the math check: under the FLSA, piece-rate earnings still have to average at least minimum wage for every hour worked, and hours over 40 still earn overtime on the blended rate. The spreadsheet that “handles” this is the one that gets audited.
Once the day starts at the shop loading trailers, the ride to the first property and every hop between properties is payable time under federal rules. Forty properties a week means hours of drive time that never hit the timesheet, quietly turning into unpaid overtime. Labor investigators know exactly where to look.
Spring hiring lands all at once: W-4s, I-9s, direct deposit forms, and half the crew filling them out on a truck tailgate. Landscaping was the largest H-2B occupation in FY2024, taking 43.4% of all H-2B visas issued, so for many companies the surge comes with federal wage paperwork on top.
Per-head software pricing bills the whole roster whether anyone mows or not, and per-run fees meter the weekly Fridays your crews expect: 30-plus runs a season, each with a line item. The season ends. The invoice doesn’t.
The crew clocks in with Jobber, LMN, Service Autopilot, or ClockShark, GPS stamp and all. Then somebody exports the week to a spreadsheet, fixes it, and re-types it into a payroll system that has never heard of a property. The job numbers fall off on the way, so the next bid gets priced on a guess.
Workers’ comp premiums ride on estimated payroll, and a payroll that doubles between February and July makes every estimate wrong. When the audit letter arrives, you need per-run records by class of work, not a year-end reconstruction from bank statements.
Every one of these has a concrete answer below, priced for a crew business, not a campus.
WageTime charges $50 a month per company plus $8 per person paid that month. Nothing per run, nothing per Friday, nothing for the laid-off crew waiting on spring. The fall layoff runs through a bulk termination wizard instead of one-by-one clicks, and March rehires come back with records retained: no re-keying last year’s paperwork. New hires self-onboard from their phones with e-signatures, and electronic I-9 with E-Verify case tracking is built into onboarding.
| Month | People paid | Runs | Invoice |
|---|---|---|---|
| February | 6 | 4 | $98.00 |
| March | 14 | 4 | $162.00 |
| April | 19 | 5 | $202.00 |
| July | 22 | 5 | $226.00 |
| November | 9 | 4 | $122.00 |
| December | 6 | 4 | $98.00 |
Replaces the January software bill for a crew that’s home watching football, and the per-run fee on all thirty Fridays.
WageTime runs per-yard, per-job, and day-rate pay as per-unit pay codes alongside hourly, with minimum-wage processing at federal, state, and local levels and overtime computed on the weighted-average regular rate when a week mixes methods. A 100-lawn week with a rained-out Thursday on hourly shop time comes out as one paycheck with the blend done in the run, not in a spreadsheet with a formula someone’s cousin wrote. For context: the median crew wage in the landscaping services industry was $18.21 an hour as of May 2023 (BLS), close enough to minimum wage that a missed January rate reset becomes systematic underpayment.
| Line | Units / Hours | Rate | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mowing route A per-lawn code | 62 lawns | $6.50 | $403.00 |
| Mowing route B per-lawn code | 38 lawns | $6.50 | $247.00 |
| Shop + rain day hourly | 6.0 hrs | $17.00 | $102.00 |
| Blended regular rate | 46.0 total hrs | $16.35 | - |
| Overtime premium | 6.0 OT hrs | 0.5 × $16.35 | $49.05 |
Replaces the per-yard spreadsheet that never heard of the regular rate, and the week it finally meets an investigator.
WageTime’s mobile crew clock lives on the phones the crew already carries: every punch lands with a GPS stamp, geofenced to a radius you set per property, with a map view of where the day actually went. Drive time between properties runs as its own paid-time code so windshield hours stop leaking into unpaid overtime, and approved hours flow straight into the payroll run. Already tracking time in a field app? We import clock hours so there’s no double entry; tell us your system on the demo and we’ll confirm the exact flow for your setup.
| Property | Crew | Hours | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Maple Grove HOA | Crew 2 | 9.5 | In geofence |
| Hillcrest Office Park | Crew 1 | 6.0 | In geofence |
| Riverbend Apartments | Crew 1 | 4.5 | 1 outside geofence |
| Drive time between properties | Crew 1 | 2.0 | Paid-time code |
Replaces the export-and-re-key ritual, and the drive time nobody wrote down until a lawyer asked for it.
WageTime tags every hour and wage dollar to a job-cost code, with codes up to 40 characters, adjustable to the property and contract codes your estimates already use. Labor cost reports come out by property, contract, and crew, so the HOA that eats three extra visits a month shows up in numbers before renewal, not after. Finished payroll posts to QuickBooks mapped by department, and a configurable GL export covers everything else.
| Contract | Crew | Hours | Labor cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Maple Grove HOA | Crew 2 | 148.0 | $2,886.00 |
| Hillcrest Office Park | Crew 1 | 92.5 | $1,795.50 |
| Residential route A | Crew 3 | 176.0 | $3,168.00 |
| City of Fairview grounds public | Crew 1 | 108.0 | $3,283.00 |
Replaces pricing next year’s contract off a guess, and the shoebox reconstruction when the comp auditor asks what the tree crew earned.
Municipal mowing, roadside maintenance, and grounds work on public money bring prevailing-wage rates per classification and certified payroll reporting. WageTime handles both as an add-on, scoped and priced on the demo: project- and location-specific wage rules per classification, fringe payable as cash or against bona fide benefit plans, and WH-347 certified payroll reports generated from the payroll run with job-costing segments for federal public work. The same crew can mow private on Monday and prevailing-rate on Tuesday without a second system.
| Worker | Classification | Base + fringe | Hours | Gross |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Marco T. | Landscape Laborer, Group 1 | $19.80 + $6.10 | 40.0 | $1,036.00 |
| Dee W. | Landscape Equipment Operator | $24.50 + $7.25 | 36.0 | $1,143.00 |
| Sam K. | Tree Trimmer, roadside | $26.10 + $8.40 | 32.0 | $1,104.00 |
Replaces turning down the city contract because the paperwork needed a second office person.
Yes, as a per-unit pay code, with the compliance math handled in the run: piece-rate earnings are checked against minimum wage for all hours worked, and weeks that mix per-yard and hourly pay compute overtime on the weighted-average regular rate automatically. You set the per-lawn or per-yard rate; WageTime does the reconciliation every payday.
$50 for the company plus $8 for each person you actually paid that month. A December roster of six costs $98; the twenty seasonal crew members you laid off in November cost nothing until you rehire them. There are no per-run fees, so weekly summer Fridays don’t inflate the bill either.
The November layoff is one pass through a bulk termination wizard, not twenty individual terminations. When the crew returns in March, their records are still there: returning workers confirm details rather than starting over, and anyone new fills out everything from a phone before the first route runs, I-9 and E-Verify included.
We import clock hours so there’s no double entry. Tell us your field app or time clock on the demo and we’ll confirm the exact flow for your setup, including how hours land against your property and contract codes. No app? Crews can punch on WageTime’s own GPS-stamped, geofenced mobile clock instead.
Yes. Certified payroll is offered as an add-on, scoped and priced on the demo. The reports generate from the payroll run itself, each worker’s classification carries its own project-specific rate, and fringe is tracked per plan instead of guessed at quarter’s end. Bring the city’s wage determination and your route list to the demo.
The 1099-or-W-2 call belongs to your accountant or attorney: the Labor Department applies an economic-reality test, not labels, and landscaping is a named enforcement target. What WageTime removes is the operational excuse. W-2 crew and 1099 subs run in the same payroll, with year-end W-2s and 1099s both included, so classifying someone correctly never means buying a second system.
A route sheet, last week’s hours from your field app, and your crew count in July versus January. Twenty minutes with a payroll specialist on a live demo company: you’ll see the per-yard math, the GPS punches, the labor cost by contract, and what your season actually costs.
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