TreeBossPro Blog — Tree Service Software

Job Categories That Show the Shape of a Tree Company's Week

Two tree companies can each have twenty jobs on the board next week and be facing completely different weeks. One has three big removals, a dozen prunes and some stumps. The other has twenty PHC visits. Same number of jobs, different crews, different equipment and different money.

Job categories are how you tell those weeks apart without reading every job.

Why a Job Count Isn't Enough

In Sales Tax and Online Payments on Tree Service Invoices, the focus was on the money side of every invoice. Categories connect money back to the work. TreeBossPro uses six tree job categories: Removals, Trimming and Pruning, Stump Grinding, Plant Health Care, Storm and Emergency, and Consults. Every job carries one.

That sounds like a small thing. In practice, it's what lets the board, the schedule and the reports speak the same language as your crews.

When a foreman asks what next week looks like, the honest answer isn't a number. It's something like two big removals Tuesday and Thursday, pruning filling the gaps, a stump day Friday and PHC running all week on its own route. Categories let the board give that answer at a glance.

Removals and Trimming and Pruning

Removals are usually your biggest jobs: more people, more equipment, more risk and more weather sensitivity. Seeing them as their own category tells you how many heavy days you have, which crews they need and whether the bucket truck is double-booked.

Trimming and Pruning is your flexible work. It fills around removals, often moves when weather shifts and is frequently recurring. Seeing it separately tells you how much slack you have in a week and how much of your work comes back on a cycle.

A week heavy on removals and light on pruning is a week with little room for surprises. A week with lots of pruning is a week you can bend when a storm hits.

Stump Grinding and Plant Health Care

Stump Grinding usually runs as its own route with its own machine and operator. Categorizing it separately makes it easy to see the backlog of stumps waiting after removals, and to keep that list from growing.

Plant Health Care visits go to licensed applicators on their own schedule. Keeping them in their own category keeps PHC visible, both for planning the applicator's routes and for seeing how much of your revenue comes from programs.

Both categories are classic follow-up work. When they have their own place on the board, they stop getting buried under the bigger, louder jobs.

Storm and Emergency, and Consults

Storm and Emergency work needs to be visible precisely because it disrupts everything else. When it has its own category, you can see how much of a week was eaten by emergencies and which regular jobs were pushed as a result.

Consults cover site visits and assessments. They're short, but they feed every other category. Tracking them shows how much estimating you're doing and whether consults are turning into work.

After a big storm, comparing a week of storm work to a normal week tells you a lot about capacity and pricing for next time.

Using Categories on the Board

On the job board, categories make the week readable. Category labels tell you at a glance that Thursday is heavy on removals, that stumps are piling up or that Friday has room for consults. That's the view a perfectly maintained whiteboard would give you, without the maintenance.

Use categories when you schedule, too. Anchor the week with removals, fill around them with pruning on the same side of town and keep stumps and PHC on their own routes.

Pick the category honestly when you create the job. A storm cleanup that was booked as a regular removal hides how much emergency work you really did, and a consult that turned into a prune should become a pruning job rather than staying a consult. Accurate categories are what make the board and the reports trustworthy.

Using Categories in Your Reports

Over time, categories tell you what kind of company you are. Reports show where jobs and revenue come from, so you can see whether removals are carrying the business, whether PHC is growing and how much storm work really adds up to in a year.

That's useful for pricing, hiring and buying equipment. If pruning and PHC are growing, maybe the next hire is a climber or an applicator rather than another groundie. Job categories are a simple part of TreeBossPro tree service software that make every other part easier to read. The next article looks at those reports in more detail.