A quote app for landscapers — the ground always has other ideas

Where landscaping margins get buried

• What's under the ground. You priced the excavation off a lawn that looked like a lawn. Four hundred down, the digger rings off rock — or a root ball from a long-gone gum, or someone's 1970s shed slab. Machine time doubles, there's breaker hire and extra tipping, and if the quote didn't exclude rock and the variation never gets written, the whole overrun is yours.
• Substitutions on the fly. The nursery is out of the lilly pillies on the plan, so you agree on a swap at a different price per plant — 40 plants later, that's real money moving with nothing in writing. Same story when the customer upgrades from treated pine sleepers to sandstone blocks after the quote.
• “While the machine's here…” An extra garden bed along the fence. One more irrigation zone now the trencher's on site. Sensible for everyone — and almost always agreed verbally between loads, then squeezed into the original price at invoice time because nobody wrote it down.

Landscaping variations are lost at the trench, not at the desk. The fix has to work with muddy gloves and a running machine.

Rock in the trench, variation before the breaker arrives

That's an A$1,900 conversation you can now have with the owner before the breaker truck leaves the yard — in writing, with their go-ahead, instead of as a shock on the final invoice. The numbers are exactly the ones you said: prices come from the user and stay editable. Timmy structures the work and wording; it does not invent amounts.

Quotes from the walkaround, not the kitchen table

Landscaping quotes die in the gap between the site visit and the laptop. You walk the block, hold five prices and a dozen measurements in your head, and by the third quote-night that week two of them never get written. Instead, talk it out in the ute before you drive off: demolition and green waste, cut and fill, edging, turf by the metre, planting, mulch, irrigation zones — each with your number. Timmy drafts the quote there and then, so the job goes on the board while the competitor is still promising to “get something over this week”. See quote from site notes for the full flow.

One habit worth stealing from the big civil firms: put your ground-conditions position in the quote itself — what depth you've allowed, rock and roots excluded. Then the day the bucket rings, the variation is expected rather than argued.

What Timmy asks when a landscaping note is missing details

When an important detail is missing (a price, a customer, a scope item), Timmy asks rather than making it up. On landscaping notes, that means:

• Quantities without prices. “About 60 square of turf and mulch for the beds” gets scoped, and Timmy asks for your rate — it never fills in a market price for turf, plants or machine hire.
• Which stage, which job? If you're running front yard and back yard as separate quotes for the same customer, it asks where the extra garden bed belongs instead of guessing.
• Substitutions half-specified. “Swap the lilly pillies for viburnum” without a count or a per-plant price triggers a question, not an invented total.

Fit, honestly

TradieCue suits solo tradies and small owner-operated trade businesses (roughly 1–5 people) in australia — the owner-operator with a digger and a trailer, or a small crew where whoever ran the machine also writes the invoice. It drafts quotes, variations and payment follow-ups from rough notes; that's the whole job. It doesn't schedule crews, track plant and equipment, or do take-offs from landscape plans, and it's iPhone only for now. If your work is mostly maintenance rounds on fixed monthly pricing, you'll use it less; if you build — retaining walls, paving, planting, drainage — the variation capture alone earns its keep.

Common questions