October 15, 2026 · Mitt Patel · 6 min read
It's the third week of April, you've run 40 irrigation start-ups at $75 each, and your crew spent a full week on nothing else. You made $3,000. You just don't know yet whether you made any money.
Why this happens
Irrigation start-ups and winterizations are a different kind of job than the rest of your season. They're quick, they're priced low because customers expect that, and you run a lot of them in a short window. A mowing route or a design-build job gets its own estimate, its own material list, its own sense of whether it was worth doing. Start-ups and winterizations usually don't. They get folded into "spring work" or "fall work" in your books, lumped in with mulch jobs, cleanups, and whatever else is happening that week.
The problem is that these visits have their own cost structure. You're paying a tech to drive to a property, run through a checklist, maybe swap a head or a valve, and move on. If the drive time is long, or the visit runs over because of a stuck valve or a conversation with the homeowner, the economics on a $75 visit change fast. When irrigation is buried inside your general spring revenue, you can't see that. You just see that spring was busy and the bank account looks fine.
The cost shows up later. You quote next year's start-ups at the same price without knowing if this year's actually covered labor. You keep a tech on irrigation routes all spring without knowing if that's the best use of their time compared to putting them on mowing or installs. You bid a maintenance contract that includes "free" start-up and winterization without knowing what that's actually costing you to give away.
A worked example
Say you ran 40 irrigation start-ups in April at $75 each. That's $3,000 in revenue.
Each start-up takes a tech about 45 minutes on site, plus drive time that averages 15 minutes between stops. Call it an hour per visit, all in. Forty visits is 40 hours of labor. Assume your tech costs $24 an hour, fully loaded with payroll costs. That's $960 in labor.
Add in a handful of small parts — a few sprinkler heads, some fittings, maybe a backflow test — say $200 total across the 40 jobs.
Revenue: $3,000 Labor: $960 Parts: $200 Gross margin: $1,840, or about 61%
That's a reasonable margin. But now say the actual average visit runs 75 minutes instead of 60, because of older systems, longer drives between properties, or homeowners who want to chat about their lawn. That's 50 hours of labor instead of 40, or $1,200 instead of $960. Your margin drops to $1,600, or about 53%. Still fine, but worth knowing — especially if you're about to quote next spring's start-ups at the same $75 and plan your routes the same way.
Without tracking this separately, you'd never see the gap between the 60-minute assumption and the 75-minute reality. You'd just see "spring revenue" and move on.
How to set it up
- Create two service items in QuickBooks Online: one for irrigation start-up, one for winterization. If you do backflow testing separately, give that its own item too. Each should map to your regular landscaping income account, but as its own line so you can run reports on it.
- Track labor hours by job, not just by day. If your crew uses time tracking tied to jobs in QuickBooks Online, make sure irrigation visits get logged as irrigation, not as general spring maintenance. If you're tracking time on paper or in a separate app, make sure it rolls up the same way before it hits the books.
- Record parts used on irrigation visits against the irrigation job, not against a general supplies account. Even small stuff — heads, nozzles, fittings — should tag back to irrigation so the cost shows up where it belongs.
- Run a profit and loss by service type at the end of the season. This is the report that tells you whether irrigation start-ups and winterizations covered their own labor and parts, separate from everything else you did that month. If your bookkeeper sets up classes or locations for this, ask them to add "irrigation" as its own class so it's one click to pull.
- Compare the two seasons. Spring start-ups and fall winterizations often have different time-per-visit averages, since fall visits sometimes involve blowing out lines with a compressor, which takes longer than a spring start-up. Keep them as separate items so you can see that difference instead of averaging it away.
Mistakes that undo it
- Bundling irrigation into a flat "spring cleanup" invoice. If the invoice doesn't break out the irrigation line, the revenue side of your tracking is already broken, no matter how well you track labor.
- Letting techs log time as "general maintenance" instead of tagging it to the irrigation job. This is the most common gap. The fix has to happen at the point the tech writes down or clocks their time, not after.
- Forgetting drive time. A lot of owners count only the time on-site and skip the time between stops. On a route of small, quick jobs, drive time is often the biggest hidden cost.
- Not updating pricing after you see the numbers. Tracking this stuff only helps if you look at it before you set next year's price, not after the season's already booked.
Monthly checklist
- Confirm irrigation start-up and winterization invoices use their own service items, not a general maintenance line.
- Check that tech time logs show irrigation jobs tagged separately from mowing, cleanups, or install work.
- Make sure parts and small materials used on irrigation visits are coded to the irrigation job.
- Pull a quick profit and loss by service type and glance at the irrigation line before the season ends, not after.
Common questions
Should I track start-ups and winterizations as one item or two?
Two, generally. They often take different amounts of time and use different parts — winterization may involve a compressor and blow-out, start-up may involve head adjustments and leak checks. Separate items let you see if one is more profitable than the other.
What if I include irrigation start-up for free as part of a maintenance contract?
You should still track the labor and parts cost against an irrigation job internally, even if there's no separate invoice line for the customer. Otherwise that cost gets buried in your contract maintenance numbers and you lose the ability to see what the "free" visit is actually costing you.
How much detail do I need on parts?
Enough to know if a visit was a simple system check or if it turned into a repair. A head or two is normal and cheap. If you're replacing valves or doing bigger repairs, that should probably be its own line item and invoice, not absorbed into the flat start-up price.
Does this matter if I only do a small number of irrigation visits each season?
It matters less at low volume, but it's still useful once you cross a few dozen visits a season, since small per-visit numbers add up fast and small time overruns are easy to miss without separate tracking.
North Hudson Bookkeeping sets up this kind of tracking for landscaping and irrigation businesses and keeps it current season after season, so you have the numbers in hand before you price next year's work. The first call is free.
