The growing months feel like profit. The off season has not sent its bills yet.
Cash is thick when the grass is growing and thin when it is not. A profit and loss that celebrates July is not a spending plan if the trucks, the insurance, and the winter payroll are still ahead of you. Separately, a mower or a truck that will work for years is not a supply expense on the day you buy it. It is a machine. The cost spreads. Your tax preparer chooses the life and the method. The books only have to show a machine rather than a bag of mulch. And crew wages that are not tied to a route or a job cannot tell you which contract actually worked.
A seasonal contract billed in March for a summer of cuts is cash in March and work across the summer. Taking the whole contract into March sales makes March look like the year, and makes July, when you are paying the crew to do the work, look strangely poor. Hold what you have not earned yet. Recognize it as you mow, or on a plain schedule that matches the season you sold. The point is that the bank balance in March is partly money you are still obliged to work off.
The reverse happens in the fall. Work slows, and the bills you deferred in your head come due. A cash budget that only says the summer felt good is not a budget. You need the off-season costs written down as costs you already know: insurance renewals, equipment payments, the people you kept on. This page will not invent those amounts for you. Your own bills are the list. The books should have a place to see them coming, instead of discovering them when the account is already short.
When you buy a mower, a trailer, or a truck, you bought a tool that survives the invoice. Code it as equipment, not as shop supplies and not as the job it happened to be purchased near. Repairs and fuel are costs of the period. The machine itself is not. If you expense the machine, that month looks ruined and every later month looks more profitable than it is, because the machine is working for free on paper.
Loans and leases need their own lines. The payment leaving the bank is not 'equipment' a second time, or you will have expensed the machine and expensed the loan that bought it. The payment splits, in ordinary cases, between paying down what you owe and the interest or the lease cost. Your tax preparer will say if a particular contract is a lease or a purchase. Until that answer exists, do not dump the whole payment into miscellaneous. Label it as the truck payment so it can be reclassified without a treasure hunt.
Recurring maintenance has a price and a crew. If the wages sit in one company-wide payroll account, every route looks equally profitable, which means you do not know. Put the hours on the route, the contract, or the job. A one-time install, a mulch job, a irrigation repair: same rule. Materials on that job, labor on that job. Overhead, the yard rent and the owner's salary if it is not on a crew, stays overhead so it does not punish one contract at random.
Materials have a shelf too. Mulch, stone, and chemicals you have not put on a property yet are still yours. Expensing the nursery bill on delivery day and then also putting materials on the job double-counts, or, if you never put them on the job, it charges the week of the delivery for work you have not done. Pick one moment. The honest moment is when the material goes on the property.
Send the contract list, the equipment list or the loan statements, the last season's bank statements, and however you track crew time. The first product is a separation: cash you have already earned, cash you still owe work for, machines shown as machines, and a sample of routes with labor on them so you can see the shape. The bank matches. January is no longer a surprise that July was supposed to have remembered.
You do not fix a seasonal business by recoding July until it looks smaller. You fix it by refusing to spend, on paper or in fact, the portion of summer cash that is still a promise to show up in January.
Only the part of the work March already included. The rest is a liability until you do the cuts. The cash can sit in the bank the whole time. Cash and income are not the same event.
Put the mower in as equipment. How fast the cost is recognized is a tax-preparer decision, with rules this page will not invent. Expensing it as mulch makes the books wrong even if a tax choice later accelerates the deduction.
If you want to know which contract works, yes. Company-wide payroll makes every route look the same. The hours already happened. The books just have to admit which route they happened on.
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