Landscape Specialist Weeds Out Paper and Thrives

CNG and QuickBooks® Enterprise Solutions helps Freeman Landscape clear out the clutter of paper and find real business value with higher profits and newfound efficiencies.

Freeman Landscape has grown from a home-based office to a major commercial landscaper with 85 full-time employees in less than two decades. As the business grew, Freeman Landscape turned to technology to add efficiencies that would help it succeed in an ever-increasing competitive environment.

From the start, we have relied on cuttingedge technology to be more efficient and to run our business better," says Robin Freeman, president of Freeman Landscape. A long-time QuickBooks® user, the growing business migrated from QuickBooks Pro to QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions when the size of its data files continued to increase. When lost paperwork and lack of storage space began bogging the business down, Freeman enthusiastically stepped into the more modern era of document management.

Business Challenge

Freeman Landscape manages approximately 300 new projects per year, as well as 100 maintenance accounts each month. Each project creates a paper trail that must be filed and stored—creating a mountain of paperwork.

Office space was at a premium, causing the company to store files more than two years old offsite. When customers requested irrigation information or other project details, retrieving the offsite documents was a major hassle.

Another key pain point was incoming labor logs. The paper-based process of tracking time and material records of more than 10 projects each day left the business open to financial losses. "When the paperwork is lost, you’re out of luck and can’t bill for the materials or the time," says Freeman. "We were losing paperwork on a weekly basis."

Solution Overview

Freeman Landscape set a goal to become completely paperless within 18 months. The company chose the Cabinet NG® Shared Access Filing Environment (CNG-SAFE®) document management software to help them kick the paper habit. For a complete solution, Freeman Landscape added CNG-Books®, which integrates with the company’s accounting software, QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions.

CNG-Books shares billing, credit card, payment, and other details with QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions. Freeman Landscape’s staff scans documents into CNG-Books. While viewing a document, CNG-Books simplifies data entry by synchronizing information directly from QuickBooks. CNG-Books goes one step further by adding the ability to locate and display any filed document associated with a specific Transaction, Vendor, or Customer directly from within QuickBooks.

Business Benefits

Since introducing CNG-Books, Freeman Landscape has reduced its bookkeeping time by eight hours per week, or 416 hours annually. The real time-saver, says Freeman, is the easy access she has to all necessary documents when she does her weekly billing.

"Wasting time searching for a document is very frustrating. Cabinet NG has brought that searching and frustration to an end. Because QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions is integrated with CNGBooks, I can double-click on an invoice and see all the associated information such as time, materials, and vendor interactions in one place."

CNG-Books and QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions are also contributing to the company’s bottom-line profits. In the past, Freeman Landscape was prone to losing key paperwork that recorded time and material costs. With CNG-Books, the labor logs, work orders, and other associated documents that track this information are immediately scanned and linked to the invoice in QuickBooks. Linking these critical transactions prevents the loss of billable hours and materials.

"We are missing fewer billing opportunities now that we have a better means to track labor logs through CNG-Books," says Freeman. "We expect to decrease our overhead, raise our revenue, and increase our overall business profit."

The new document management process is making a good impression on customers too. Because all customer documents are linked and easy to locate, the office staff can quickly respond to customer queries about the project or invoice.

"CNG-SAFE and CNG-Books has helped us become better organized," says Freeman. "Customers are getting faster responses to their questions, which makes us look good."

Looking to the future, Freeman Landscape intends to move its Human Resource department to CNG-SAFE and begin tracking more projects with CNG-Books.

"We are realizing the ways we can use CNG-Books and QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions are endless. The two companies have a history of working together and adding complementary features. One of the new QuickBooks features was incorporating assets. We can take that to another level by tracking equipment and auto repairs through Cabinet NG," says Freeman. "Working with both these products has been phenomenal."