Lawnix
My home built, Excel file to keep track of lawn mows, make invoices and organize payroll.
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The Story behind Lawnix
The Story behind Lawnix
I created Lawnix for use in my lawn business for years, and it has been very useful for me. I thought I might as well share it on my website in case it is useful to others!
Lawnix started as a school project in college. While running my lawn business each summer from high school through college, I got frustrated with the time it took each month to create all the invoices. What should be the best time of the month (getting paid) was also the most dreaded time (getting the invoices created and out)! Getting bills out on time is the most important part of running a business - CASH FLOW! My business grew from ten lawns to over a hundred the first few years and eventually peaked at 250 clients. Creating invoices for my growing business eventually took over 20-30 hours at the end of each month. My frustration at bill time led me to build Lawnix, which can pump out a simple, nice looking PDF invoice for my entire clientele in about 2 minutes. I would then attach these to an email or print them out and mail them to my clients.
The primary pain point it solved so quickly was creating the invoices. But I slowly developed other nice features, which include payroll tracking, mapping of my business using "www.batchgeo.com", creating a bill checklist, and other incremental improvement that made life so much easier and kept things organized -- like a mini CRM.
There is software out there, like Quickbooks, that can do what this document does for a monthly subscription fee. However, I penny pinched and liked building my own management tools. More than anything, the Lawnix project helped me to learn computer programming, which I have come to find out that I really enjoy. I have learned it is much easier to learn programming concepts and skills when you have a personal problem to solve or a data set that you are passion about. The billing process was just that for me. And I had fun creating it.
I am offering Lawnix for free, no strings attached, as an open source project. Lawnix is built on VBA, the primary scripting language of Excel. All of the code modules are exposed in hopes that curious, budding programmers that can learn from my code and pique their interest to learn and develop computer programming skills.
Just a caveat that this product was never meant to share, ship or sell -- I am simply sharing it as is the way I used it. I did reformat some things and tried to dummy-proof it as best I could. That being said, there may be some irregularities or bugs. I do know that it works best on a Windows computer, so if you use it on a Mac computer be aware there may be some unsquashed bugs in the code.
If you find Lawnix useful, please feel free to reach out to me at lawnixapp@gmail.com and give me some feedback! Thanks for checking it out and hope it is as useful to you as it is for me!
Lawn Tracking
Lawn Tracking
Mark who and which lawn got mowed, and when. You can easily keep track of lawn mows by logging them in the sheet. Simply put a word or letter in the row and column that intersect where the client and the date of the mow meet, respectively.
For example, I usually had 3 groups:
1) R - to mark which ones I mowed by myself
2) RX - to mark on ones I mowed with my team
3) X - to mark the lawns mowed by my 2nd team
Create Invoices
Create Invoices
With the click of a button at the end of the month, all of your client bills will be created and saved in a folder on your computer. This was the original PAIN POINT that pushed me to create this program, as I would often spend hours at the end of each month just making invoices. Now, with Lawnix, it takes all of about 2 minutes.
You have two options:
- Run All Bills -- this will create a PDF of ALL your clients, in one go.
- Single Bill -- if you only need to create 1 invoice, click on the row of the 1 client you wish to create the bill for, and click the Single Bill button.
Both will output PDF invoices to the corresponding month of the bill in the “Bills” folder, which is located in the same spot where the Lawnix file is saved.
Who has paid?
Who has paid?
You won't be in business long if you do not collect payment efficiently and effectively. Keeping track of who has paid and who hasn't is easy in Lawnix. Hopefully you get lots of tips too!
Payroll
Payroll
Keep track of what you owe yourself and your team for the work getting done. Put in the hourly wage of each person, and jot the number of hours each person works for each day, and Lawnix will calculate how much they earn and how much you pay bi-weekly.
*Tip your team members often -- it pays dividends ;)
These are the highlights. You can refer to the official documentation for more help and getting started!
These are the highlights. You can refer to the official documentation for more help and getting started!
Good luck mowing and make it a great season!
Good luck mowing and make it a great season!
Give it a try today!
Give it a try today!
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