WageTime is payroll for independently owned The Grounds Guys franchises: the full-service shop that keeps its crew all year by moving them from maintenance to holiday lighting to snow and ice, with the pay basis and the class of work following every switch.
For independently owned and operated The Grounds Guys® franchises. WageTime is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by The Grounds Guys, Neighborly®, or their affiliates. The Grounds Guys® and related marks are trademarks of their respective owners, used here only to describe the businesses this page serves.
The point of a full-service book is that the crew never goes home for the winter. That is great for retention and brutal for a payroll built to onboard in March and lay off in November, because the same person changes what they do, how they are paid, and which comp class they fall under three times before the year is out.
The crew leader who runs a mowing route in July is on a ladder stringing holiday lights in December and behind a plow blade at 4 a.m. in January. Each service line is a different pay basis and a different workers comp class of work, and a payroll that only knows “landscaping” quietly miscodes two-thirds of the year.
The Grounds Guys runs on people moving up: laborer to crew leader to field manager. Give a mid-season promotion and the raise has to start on the right paycheck, not scramble the last month of overtime backward. A rate change typed into a note and applied “next time we remember” is a back-pay letter waiting to happen.
The office manager and a field manager are salaried, the crews are hourly, and an install team might be on a day rate. Generic payroll wants them in separate buckets or separate systems. They belong on one run, with the salaried managers, the hourly crews, and the day-rate installers all reconciling on the same payday.
Reported FDD terms describe a license fee of roughly 5-6% of gross sales plus about a 2% marketing fund contribution, and supply pricing is already negotiated across the Neighborly network. That stack is fixed. Labor is the one big cost you steer week to week, and an office that cannot read it per crew and per contract is steering blind.
December’s holiday-lighting jobs and January’s plow routes live in the scheduling app as their own coded line items, tagged by service line and site. Then the week is exported, cleaned, and re-keyed into a payroll run that reads none of that: the lighting job number and the snow on-call code drop in the handoff, so hours land with no contract behind them. By the time the invoice prints, per-contract cost is a guess for the very jobs you priced most carefully.
All three service lines run through one roster and one payroll run in WageTime, with the pay basis and the class of work switching by the week instead of by a new hire, so the crew never leaves the roster between seasons.
| Service line | Pay basis | Comp class |
|---|---|---|
| Mowing & maintenanceApr-Oct | Hourly | Landscape gardening |
| Design & installJun-Sep | Day rate | Landscape gardening |
| Holiday lightingNov-Dec | Per-job code | Elevation install |
| Snow & iceDec-Mar | On-call hourly | Snow & ice |
Replaces the November layoff you did not want and the miscoded winter you did not notice until the comp audit.
Every rate change in WageTime is dated to the day it takes effect, so the laborer-to-crew-leader-to-field-manager promotions the brand’s executive-management model keeps producing land on the correct paycheck, with overtime recomputed from the new rate forward, never backward.
Replaces the raise scribbled on a note and the overtime math that ran off last month’s rate.
Yes: WageTime codes every hour and wage dollar to the property, contract, and crew your estimates use, so a mowing route, a holiday-lighting job, and a plow contract each carry their own labor line, and the account eating an extra crew shows up before renewal.
| Contract | Hours | Labor cost |
|---|---|---|
| Residential route ACrew 1 | 164.0 | $3,116.00 |
| Lakeside HOACrew 2 · maintenance | 138.5 | $2,867.50 |
| Northgate RetailCrew 3 · comm'l, multi-site | 121.0 | $2,904.00 |
| City of Elmwood groundsCrew 2 | 96.0 | $2,592.00 |
Replaces pricing next year’s contract off a hunch and rebuilding a commercial account’s hours from a shoebox when the comp auditor calls.
$50 a month per company plus $10 for each person actually paid that month, unlimited runs included. Because a full-service book keeps people working through the winter, the December bill covers the crew still hanging lights and running plows, not an idle roster.
Replaces the payroll bill you could not read without a sales call and the per-run fee on every winter Friday.
Full-service payroll is $10 a month per person paid that month, plus $50 a month per company, with unlimited runs. No long-term contracts, no per-run charges.
Off-cycle runs and bonuses cost nothing extra. No long-term contracts; cancel anytime.
Example: 50 people paid × $10 + $50 company = $550 for the month
HR & hiring, onboarding, PTO, time tracking, benefits, and workers’ comp are optional add-ons, priced separately when you’re ready.
See a demoAll three run on one roster and one payroll run, with the pay basis and workers comp class of work tagged per week. A worker is hourly on a mowing route in summer, on a per-job or day-rate code for holiday-lighting installs in December, and on an on-call code for snow and ice in winter, and weeks that mix methods compute overtime on the weighted-average regular rate automatically.
Every rate change is dated to the day it takes effect, so a promotion lands on the correct paycheck and overtime recomputes from the new rate forward, never backward. Salaried field managers, hourly crews, and day-rate install teams all run on the same payday, and role-based access lets the office manager process payroll without holding the owner’s bank controls.
Each week books to its own class of work, so a crew member on the landscape class in July, an elevation-install class hanging holiday lights in December, and the snow and ice class in January is coded correctly every run. That keeps the workers comp premium built on the right base for each service line, instead of one blended guess the auditor unwinds in May.
Yes, down to the property, the crew, and the contract. Every hour and wage dollar codes to the contract numbers your estimates use, so residential routes and the multi-site commercial contracts that come through national accounts report side by side. With the license fee and marketing fund fixed off the top, labor is the one large cost you steer, and this is where you read it.
$50 per month per company plus $10 per person actually paid that month. Because the crew keeps working, the December bill covers whoever is still hanging lights and running plows, not an idle roster you are billed for anyway. Unlimited runs, weekly pay, and off-cycle checks are included, and against the reported license fee and marketing fund off the top, payroll is the line you can predict.
A mowing week, a holiday-lighting or snow week, your crew’s promotion history, and your busiest commercial contract. Twenty minutes with a payroll specialist on a live demo company: you’ll see the class of work switch by season, a promotion land on the right check, labor cost by contract, and what a full year actually costs.
Book a 20-minute demo