# Real Green Systems / Mobile Live & Snow Removal



## TerraScapesMT (Oct 23, 2008)

Moderators - if this post isn't okay here feel free to move it. It's a business software related question but I am hoping to get as much exposure as possible.

We use Real Green Systems "Service Assistant" and their Mobile Live tablet app and are trying to figure out the best way to run snow removal operations through the tablets. I'm looking for other companies using mobile live and hoping to talk with them about how they have their services set up and whether they are using special jobs or work orders etc.

Anybody out there?


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## framer1901 (Dec 18, 2005)

I use Real Green but dropped the mobile live portion as I felt it was too slow for what we were doing with the mowing crews - we kept it for fert stuff but eventually dropped that off too.

IMO - Mobile Live is a great tool that doesn't fit within what we do and how we work.

All snowplowing stuff is entered as jobs, not work orders. Any and all notes are on those jobs so the driver can see them. 

All routes are assigned trucks (crew) with sequence numbers so you can go to the invoice screen and print a route sheet whether it's all jobs assigned to that route or you can click some off like if it doesn't need done on a Saturday night. Drivers write time in and out and have room for notes. IE - salting jobs have a note that says "How much?"

Jobs that are flat priced as per event are set up so that who ever enters production cannot change the price. Jobs that can be price fluctuating like per hour, salt and cleaning up are set up so price can be altered.

Seasonal accounts like driveways, we give the snowplowing job a "value" or dollar amount and manually enter the seasonal price, how many bills it'll spit out etc. This way if you complete in production every day, you can run the installment reports and see if you did ok on your seasonal stuff.

We have jobs for snowplowing, salting by the ton, salting by the pound, sidewalk shoveling, sidewalk salt, snowplowing cleanup, loader work and trucking. The last three, they are assigned to there own "crew" in no sequence - we don't do them all the time, so when we do need them, we select them off the invoice screen and print paperwork that way.

Word of caution with Real Green - their tech support is fantastic BUT you can get steered in a very wrong direction if you're a full service landscape company that does more than fertilize, sorry Joe but it's the truth.....

I'll tell you anything you want from our experience, how we do and why we do


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## White_Gold11 (Jan 4, 2016)

framer1901 said:


> I use Real Green but dropped the mobile live portion as I felt it was too slow for what we were doing with the mowing crews - we kept it for fert stuff but eventually dropped that off too.
> 
> IMO - Mobile Live is a great tool that doesn't fit within what we do and how we work.
> 
> ...


Can you elaborate more on how they steer you in the wrong direction for multiple services? We are a full service company and I was hoping to move to Real Green this winter..Thanks


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## framer1901 (Dec 18, 2005)

White_Gold11 said:


> Can you elaborate more on how they steer you in the wrong direction for multiple services? We are a full service company and I was hoping to move to Real Green this winter..Thanks


Realize this is two years since I wrote that post - we still use Real Green - but I'm way more familiar with the whats and hows now then I was probably back then.

The support techs seemed more inclined to have you billing after every service. It's hard to describe but think of a fert company like Tru Green, they only visit a customer 5 or 7 times a year. We visit them what 30-35 times? I bill monthly, I don't do pre pays, we do have seasonals.

There are so many set up points and check boxes that need to be correct or you end up not doing the job or doing it and not billing it.

For example - You set a customers default billing method - statement, reg invoice, installment...., but in the actual service parameters, you also set the billing method BUT when you enter the actual service as a job, you set the billing method again.......

Here's another thing. Full service company - you probably are doing fall clean up for most of your weekly accounts, when you're done with fall clean up, you'll bill them just like normal by sending them their monthly invoice. What happens with Joe Smith, not a weekly customer, but a guy you are going to just do fall clean up for, nothing else....... How are you going to bill him? At the end of the month or when the job is done?

From what I can tell, there's two ways: Easy way is create a "work order", those get billed their own way BUT you can't assign it to your crews like you do all other jobs (unless you set up the fall clean up job to be a work order also but that's extra entering when you enter the job, and who's to say which customer is a work order one and who's a regular one, and where do you print the actual bill.)

The other way is just have it bill this job/customer as a regular invoice - simple easy enough hunh? Heck no - cause your guys will go complete the job, you complete it in the computer and then you forget that Joe Smith is a regular invoice kinda guy and oh **** three months later you can't tell for sure if you ever sent Joe a bill....

The hardcore problem a full service company faces is doing any work outside the norm - you want the lawn crew to stop by a one off customer and prune a bush? You better figure out how to insert it in their route and how you'll actually bill it because those two don't work together.

Terminology will kill you during training. You assign crews routes/work by invoicing, but for your monthly customers it's not an invoice, for the one off ones it isn't either unless you check the box for invoice but then everyone gets invoiced........

Real Green is built around the concept that you "invoice (bill)" every job you assign - it seems that it was after the fact added in that we could "invoice (bill or not but not both)" when we assigned work.


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## White_Gold11 (Jan 4, 2016)

Now if you schedule outside of real green for mowing and snow you avoid some of the problems you mention. Would it be dumb to work your seasonals or monthly bills scheduling outside of real green? And run weed+feed, hedges, edges, etc through real green for routing, scheduling, and ultimately billing.


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## framer1901 (Dec 18, 2005)

For some reason - I don't see notices when someone replys..

I wouldn't run two systems, the billing and money tracking would be too much. 

It's a big undertaking adding this software, definetly do it before season starts. There's just little things that are annoying but the marketing aspect seems really good, we just don't use it.

Are you going to their office to work with the software? We are in Michigan, a couple hours away from them. It's something you almost need to see.


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## framer1901 (Dec 18, 2005)

Maybe do a facetime call or figure out how to do one of those live desktops so you can see it.


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## White_Gold11 (Jan 4, 2016)

Interesting.. If we do the change it would be in the next month or so to give us ample time to change over. I guess I meant a paper route for monthly payment mowing customers and billing through real green to simplify. Otherwise like you said you are invoicing per cut. Which I do not want to do with my plan customers.


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## framer1901 (Dec 18, 2005)

Call me tomorrow during the day 616-392-1353

Chuck


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## CELandscapes (Dec 10, 2012)

White_Gold11 said:


> Interesting.. If we do the change it would be in the next month or so to give us ample time to change over. I guess I meant a paper route for monthly payment mowing customers and billing through real green to simplify. Otherwise like you said you are invoicing per cut. Which I do not want to do with my plan customers.


I got real green with a company i just bought out. I opted to not have mobile live and just print the weekly service tickets (routes) and bill monthly through real green. But still deciding how to setup snow routes and billing through the software. Definitely subscribing to learn more. Tech support has me confused more often than not.


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## White_Gold11 (Jan 4, 2016)

Sorry Chuck crazy around here. I will try reach out next week. Thanks


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## framer1901 (Dec 18, 2005)

Gonna be a long post but I'm gonna try and explain how we handle snow in Real Green.

We do a fair amount of plowing. About 140 customers; seasonal and per push, heck there's even some per inch crap in there. We plow, salt, shovel and spread walk salt - we also stack and haul snow. Not every time we plow do we charge the full price, sometimes we "cleanup", like plowing half the lot. Guessing, I'd say 50 residentials, rest is commercial.

Everything we do on any normal night gets routed before the year starts. We do not use the mapping software - I could see using it once, at the beginning of the season if you had 100's of residentials, but really, once you've built a route, it should stay that way - unless of course you shift things around. We build our routes in a Excel spreadsheet, columns are routes, rows are time. We know how long it takes to plow each place depending on the equipment so we make each row worth 15 minutes - this helps when we schedule dependent type things - it's gotta be shoveled then plowed then salted.

Routes that are printed every night are Plow1, Plow2, Loader1, Loader2, Shovel1, Shovel2 etc.... These routes will have every night type jobs, for us it's only these five: Snowplowing, Bulk Salting (billed in tons), Pound Salting (billed in pounds), Shoveling and Sidewalk Salting. 

We have other routes that aren't printed every night or ever really. Those are SCLEAN and SMISC. I'll explain this in a second but first...

Jobs/Services (job code) that we can do any night are: Snowplowing cleanup, Loader work, Salt by the pound, Salt by the ton, Sidewalk salt by the bag, Snowplowing, Sidewalk shoveling or Trucking of snow.

When you create your jobs, we make the price adjustable during production - you have to be really careful about this - it's one downside to Real Green, there is no default price, it'll price the job during production at the price it was last completed at. Why bother? There's nights we do not apply the same amount of salt, pounds, tons or bags - you get used to always editing this sales price and it's not a big deal. We have two customers that have bracket pricing - Snows 2-4", one price, 4-6" another price BS - this is the one that always gets me. We have notes on the job, you can see it on the route sheet so during production it's right there but you gotta pay attention...

The route SCLEAN is not really a route but you have to assign every job to some route. Any customer that we would possibly partially charge for plowing has a job called snowplowing cleanup. We never route cleanup jobs - if a driver marks on his normal route sheet that he just cleaned up, plowed 25% of the lot etc..., whoever completes the production, substitutes the snowplowing cleanup job for the snowplowing job and alters the price - it's simple.


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## CELandscapes (Dec 10, 2012)

framer1901 said:


> Gonna be a long post but I'm gonna try and explain how we handle snow in Real Green.
> 
> We do a fair amount of plowing. About 140 customers; seasonal and per push, heck there's even some per inch crap in there. We plow, salt, shovel and spread walk salt - we also stack and haul snow. Not every time we plow do we charge the full price, sometimes we "cleanup", like plowing half the lot. Guessing, I'd say 50 residentials, rest is commercial.
> 
> ...


 So on your per push stuff, do you wait til the end of the month to invoice them or do you do it at the end of the week or bi weekly?


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## framer1901 (Dec 18, 2005)

Now I have to side track here and talk about seasonal and per push.

Per push is easy - we bill them at the end of the month. There bill shows every line item of billing, every different type of work completed.

Seasonal:
All our residential people get billed only once at the beginning of the year - they are set up as an installment program with one bill generated.

Other seasonal accounts get say four bills, set up as installment programs.

You have to remember to set your jobs up as installment for these customers - for us cleanups are included, salt may or may not, loader work may or may not be. It's actually pretty straight forward and easy.

Seasonal driveways the way we handle them, we only do about 50 total:
A stand alone all by itself driveway get's put on a route. It's only billed once but you still have to get it done every night - it has to be on a route. Also, for dollar value tracking, the job is given some per event dollar value - you should come up with something. We take the seasonal price and divide by the number of nights we think we'll plow...

We plow private subdivisions and we plow a lot of driveways in those subdivisions. To cut down on the production entry - I'll group all those sub division driveways together and give it the dollar value of all those driveways. 

For instance - we plow Creekwood Lane for $50.00 and six driveways in there for $20.00 each. Creekwood Lane Assoc is a customer that gets billed $50.00 per plowing and invoiced monthly - it's on the route sheet. Creekwood Lane Driveways is another customer, it's on the route sheet, they have a production value of $120.00, it is set up as an installment program with a dollar value of ZERO billed once at the beginning of the year, no invoice ever gets printed - I call this a ghost customer.

Ghost customers allow you to complete less production jobs but still track production dollars. The six driveways that made up that ghost customer - they were all billed at the beginning of the year, these individual jobs were assigned to the SMISC route. There's some report that allows you to evaluate installment programs, you just have to do some pencil work to figure it out doing it this way.

The route SMISC basically holds mostly BS jobs that are never routed but I also stuff the loader work and trucking of snow jobs in there too...

There's probably something I missed.....


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## framer1901 (Dec 18, 2005)

CELandscapes said:


> So on your per push stuff, do you wait til the end of the month to invoice them or do you do it at the end of the week or bi weekly?


We only invoice monthly. We post production every day. Posting production is really what generates the line item to be billed.

You can print "monthly" invoices daily, weekly monthly, whatever.

Look at the screen print:invoices:monthly invoices. From that screen you can choose to print invoices for dates - you can get all your customers or just certain ones.

Here's an example - I have three mowing customers that want invoiced weekly. So at the print invoices monthly screen, I select there account numbers, all three of them. I set the dates as like 10/1/2018 thru 11/4/2018 and press get invoices - that gets me invoices for any work completed that last week of October (gotta pretend that the week before I used the dates of 10/1/2018 thru 10/28/2018)

Here's a fuddle thing about Real Green - before you hit the get invoices button EVER, make sure right below that button is checked print or preview. If the button is checked email, the damn thing will only bring up invoices for customers that have an email address entered.


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## framer1901 (Dec 18, 2005)

You gotta get used to the Real Green terminology.

Invoicing for us what I call normal people is just generating a route sheet.

Posting production actually adds the line item in the computer so that when you do print a monthly invoice, anything not really invoiced, get's put on that invoice (dates control that) 

Real Green also supports Regular Invoices which can greatly confuse a full service company - I don't feel Tech really explains it well and can get you way down a road you don't want to go.


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## andersman02 (May 5, 2012)

It took me a bit to change the way I thought in regards to pulling work. "invoicing" is simply pulling work to be done. You can have 1000 different options of which work to be pulled. Once the work is completed, it is either loaded in the production screen (if you are using mobile live) or manually entered in the production screen (if you are not using mobile live). Once all the things are entered that you want (if using mobile live, itll automatically fill in date/time, weather etc) you POST production which actually adds it to the customers history. Unless something has been posted, it WILL NOT be billed.

In terms of billing- you can set it up however you want. Leaving invoices at the door, monthly billing w/ or w/o invoices, prepays, discounts, etc etc all can be set up.


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## andersman02 (May 5, 2012)

CELandscapes said:


> I got real green with a company i just bought out. I opted to not have mobile live and just print the weekly service tickets (routes) and bill monthly through real green. But still deciding how to setup snow routes and billing through the software. Definitely subscribing to learn more. Tech support has me confused more often than not.


While tech support for RG has been fantastic, lots of times they are confused as to what your trying to do.

The best way I found to get the answers i wanted was to tell them what I wanted the end result to be.


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## framer1901 (Dec 18, 2005)

andersman02 said:


> While tech support for RG has been fantastic, lots of times they are confused as to what your trying to do.
> 
> The best way I found to get the answers i wanted was to tell them what I wanted the end result to be.


There's definitely something to be said about that. You really do need to set things up backwards - what you want invoices to be like then set your service up to reflect that


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