This template applies the four-block method — THE THINGS, THE LINKS, THE STATES, THE NUMBERS — to grounds care. It is filled in for a four-person landscaping firm: the example shows how to describe the two activities that live side by side in the same business, without ever describing a screen.
The difficulty specific to this trade is right there, and the template takes it head-on: an installation project has a beginning and an end, while a maintenance contract is consumed visit after visit. These are not two variants of the same thing, and merging them into one list loses the only number that really counts: how many visits are left before the season ends.
Filled in with your own vocabulary, this text serves as a brief for a developer — or as a description submitted as-is to Blueprint Maker, which turns it into an application plan to approve and then a generated application: database, screens, dashboard and demonstration data.
The template to copy
My business: grounds care firm, 4 people, two crews on the road. Year-round maintenance under contract plus one-off installation projects. THINGS tracked: - Clients (name, site address, phone, type: private or managed building) - Maintenance contracts (start date, end date, visits planned for the year, annual amount) - Visits (date completed, crew, duration, work done, green waste removed) - Installation projects (description, quote date, quote amount, start date, expected end date) - Equipment (description, date of last service) LINKS: - A maintenance contract belongs to a client. - A visit is attached to a maintenance contract. - An installation project is ordered by a client. STATES of an installation project: quote sent, quote accepted, scheduled, in progress, finished, to invoice, invoiced, abandoned. NUMBERS to see every morning: - Visits still to be made on each running contract - Contracts whose end date is approaching - Visits completed this week, by crew - Installation projects in progress - Quotes sent with no reply for more than fifteen days
Adapting this template to your organisation
- Maintenance only: if you do not take on installation work, remove the Projects entity and its link. The rest stands as it is, and the visits-remaining number becomes the heart of the application.
- Flat-rate or per-visit contracts: the example counts a number of visits planned for the year. If you bill per visit, replace “visits planned” with a unit price, and the useful number becomes the amount invoiced since the start of the year.
- Seasonality: if your visits are not evenly spread (tight mowing from April to September, pruning in winter), do not try to describe the calendar in the brief. Just note that visits are spread unevenly across the year: the structure supports it, the scheduling stays yours.
- Crews: the example puts the crew on the visit. If you track each person rather than the crew, replace it with an “Employees” entity linked to the visit, and you will get hours per person instead of hours per crew.
- The “to invoice” line marks what is still to be billed: the compliant invoice itself is produced in your invoicing tool, not in this application.