The honest answer is both, because most landscaping companies have two distinct types of revenue that need different treatment.

Recurring maintenance work like weekly mowing, hedge trimming, and seasonal cleanups should be tracked by client. You want to know that the Johnson property brings in $400 a month and takes your crew 3 hours per visit versus the Smith property that brings in $350 but eats up 5 hours because of the half-acre slope and narrow gate access. Without client-level tracking, you can’t see which accounts are actually making you money and which ones you should reprice or drop entirely.

Project-based work like patio installations, retaining walls, irrigation systems, and full landscape redesigns should be tracked by job. Each project has a bid with estimated materials, labor hours, and subcontractor costs. You need to compare what you quoted against what you actually spent. If you’re consistently underestimating labor on hardscape jobs by 20%, you won’t know that unless each project is tracked individually with costs assigned to it.

In QuickBooks Online, you can set this up using sub-customers or the Projects feature. Create each client as a customer, then create individual projects underneath them for larger jobs. Maintenance revenue hits the client directly. Installation revenue hits the specific project under that client. This gives you both views without duplicating anything.

The key is making sure every expense gets coded properly. When your crew picks up pavers and edging from the supply house, that receipt needs to be tagged to the right job. When you pay a subcontractor to run irrigation lines, that invoice goes to the specific project. Fuel costs and general crew wages for maintenance days get allocated to overhead or split across clients based on time spent.

For landscaping companies doing a mix of maintenance and projects, tracking by client alone hides whether your big installations are profitable. Tracking by job alone misses the full picture of what each ongoing client relationship is worth over a year. A client who pays $4,800 annually in maintenance and gives you two $8,000 projects a year is a $20,000 relationship. That context matters when deciding how to prioritize your time and where to focus your marketing.

A small business bookkeeper in Jacksonville who understands home and property service businesses can set up your chart of accounts and project structure so this tracking happens naturally as part of your regular bookkeeping. The setup takes a little thought upfront, but once it’s in place you get clear visibility into which clients and which types of work are actually driving your profit.