LandscapeBossPro Blog — Landscape Estimating Software

🌿 More Landscape Estimating Software guides →

How to Build Planting Takeoffs and Plant-by-Plant Estimates

A planting plan looks simple on paper — a few trees, a row of shrubs, some perennials filling in the beds. But when it comes time to bid the job, that tidy drawing turns into dozens of line items, each with its own unit cost, install labor, and markup. Miss a flat of perennials or undercount a row of arborvitae and the profit you thought you had walks right out the door. A clean planting takeoff is how you keep that from happening. In this guide we'll walk through how to turn a plant schedule into a plant-by-plant estimate using landscape software instead of a legal pad and a calculator.

Start With the Plant Schedule, Not the Price

The takeoff comes before the dollars. Walk the plan and list every species, size, and quantity exactly as the design calls for it: 7 Autumn Blaze maples at 2.5" caliper, 24 boxwood at 3 gallon, 60 daylilies at 1 gallon, and so on. In LandscapeBossPro you build each of these as its own line item on the estimate, so the count, the size, and the spec all live in one place. When the homeowner asks why the bid is what it is, you can show them a real list instead of a lump sum. That transparency is what wins design-build work against the contractor who just scribbles a number on the back of a business card.

Turn Plants Into Saved Materials You Reuse

The slow part of estimating planting jobs is re-typing the same shrubs and trees on every bid. The fix is a materials and products library. Add each plant to your saved materials list once — name, size, your cost from the nursery, and your sell price — and from then on you pull it onto an estimate in two taps. Build the Knock Out rose, the inkberry holly, the river birch clump, the bag of bark mulch, and the starter fertilizer tablets you drop in every planting hole, and your library becomes a menu. New planting bid? You're assembling it from parts you already priced, not starting from zero. When the nursery raises caliper prices in spring, you update the cost once and every future estimate reflects it.

Price the Labor That Lives Inside Each Plant

A 2.5" caliper tree is not the same install as a 1 gallon perennial, and your estimate should say so. The smart way to handle planting labor is to bake it into the unit. Decide what it costs your crew to dig, set, backfill, stake, and mulch each plant size, then carry that labor as part of the line item. In LandscapeBossPro you can break the bid into separate plant, soil amendment, and labor lines, or roll an installed price into each plant — whatever your customers respond to. The point is that when you change a quantity, the labor scales with it automatically. Bump the boxwood count from 24 to 36 and the install hours move right along with the material, so you never bid more plants at the same flat labor number.

Don't Forget the Bulk Materials Around the Plants

Plants are only half of a planting job. The beds need soil, compost, edging, and a top dressing, and those bulk materials are where a lot of estimators leave money on the table. Add them as their own line items right alongside the plants so nothing gets buried. The math for the loose stuff — mulch by the cubic yard, screened topsoil, bed amendment — works a little differently than a per-plant count, and we cover it in detail in Estimating Mulch, Sod, and Soil by the Yard With Landscape Software. Pull those numbers into the same estimate and your planting bid is whole: every tree, every shrub, every yard of mulch, and the labor to install all of it on one document.

Send a Bid the Client Can Actually Read

Once the takeoff is built, the estimate goes out as a clean, itemized proposal — plant by plant, with sizes and quantities the homeowner recognizes from the design. They can approve it from their phone, and when they do, that approved estimate becomes the job. There's no re-keying the plant list into a work order. The crew sees the same counts on the job board that the client approved, the materials feed straight into what you order from the nursery, and when the install wraps you invoice off the same line items. You can even keep a card on file and collect the deposit the moment the bid is accepted, so the plants are paid for before they're loaded on the truck. One list drives the estimate, the dispatch, the order, and the invoice.

Reuse Winning Takeoffs as Templates

Most landscape companies sell a handful of planting packages over and over — a foundation planting refresh, a privacy screen, a four-season bed makeover. After you build one good takeoff, save it as a template. The next time a similar job comes in, you load the template, tweak the quantities to fit the property, and you've got a bid in minutes instead of an evening. That speed is the difference between getting a proposal in front of a hot lead the same day they call and losing them to a faster competitor. To see how planting takeoffs fit into the rest of your bidding workflow, explore our full guide to landscape estimating software and how it ties estimates, materials, scheduling, and invoicing together.