Catch margin gaps before you send the estimate. Find the leak before month-end. Plan next year off a real P&L instead of a blank sheet. No spreadsheets. No surprises in the close.
All plansEstimate scrubber, margin badges, AI upsells Pro+Anomaly Detection & Budget Architect
Mulch spend is 3.4× a normal November.
$8,420 spent so far this month vs. $1,800–2,400 in your last three Novembers. Most of it from SiteOne Landscape Supply.
Likely cause: Three approved estimates ran “extras” with mulch this month. Two were billed; one wasn’t. The unbilled job (Maple HOA #4) accounts for ~$2,100 of the gap.
The margin leaks in three places, and none of them surface until you close the books:
By the time the books close, the season is gone.
The estimate goes out at 18% margin on a light labor line nobody caught, so the signed contract binds you to a job that breaks even at best. Found at month-end, too late to renegotiate.
The crew runs three days long and materials reorders go 22% over. The PM sees it on a printed report Friday morning, after Wednesday's losses are already booked.
The supplier you always use creeps the rate up 18%, and you catch it on the credit-card reconciliation 47 days later. Multiply by every vendor you have, and that's the margin you can't find.
One pipeline. The estimate gets scrubbed before send, the job gets costed while it's live, spend gets watched in the background, and the year gets planned from a real P&L.
You finish a draft. RootControl checks it for negative margin, low margin against your 35% target, missing labor lines, and below-cost pricing. Fix the flagged line in seconds, or override with a reason on file.
One tap asks the AI for upsells. It reads the estimate and your service catalog, then returns a short list of add-ons, each with a one-sentence written rationale. Accept or skip, then send.
Once work starts, every timesheet punch, material entry, and subcontractor charge rolls up against the estimate in real time. Jobs flip from on target to at risk at a 10% variance, causes one click away.
Spend Anomaly Detection runs nightly against a 90-day baseline per vendor and category, alerting on anything abnormal for the season. The Budget Architect plans the year and tracks monthly variance (thresholds in Under the hood).
Each tool earns its keep on its own. Together they catch the leaks at every stage: before send, during the job, across the quarter, and over the year.
Every draft runs through fixed, predictable rule checks before it can be sent. Margin gaps and coverage holes are caught at the source, not at month-end.
A short list of complementary add-ons on every estimate, each with a one-sentence written rationale so you (and the customer) know why.
Three states, glanceable from any estimate list. Green for Good, amber for Low, red for Negative. The badge updates as you edit, so you never send blind.
Actual vs. estimated, while the job is still in flight. Labor, materials, and equipment tracked separately, with approved and pending actuals shown side by side.
Background watcher on every vendor and category. Cost overruns, runaway fuel, vendor-rate creep, flagged the day they happen, not at month-end close.
A starter annual P&L generated from industry benchmarks calibrated to your revenue. Edit, lock, and watch the variance run live against actuals all year.
Generic finance tools see transactions. RootControl sees the job behind them. Anomaly detection runs on a per-category seasonality curve, so alerts fire only when spend is off for the season.
The shaded band is the normal range we’ve learned from your last three years of mulch spend. The dashed line is the upper threshold. Cross it, and you get an alert.
May is loud and that’s fine. Mulch spend triples for spring installs every year. A generic tool sees a 3× jump and panics. We see a normal May.
November is the catch. The same dollar amount in November is wildly outside the range we’ve seen for any of your last three Novembers. That’s the alert you actually want.
Owners don't open a dashboard to scan nine widgets; they want what changed since yesterday. The morning brief promotes what needs a decision today. The rest stays one click away.
Morning brief · Tuesday
As of 7:04 AMRevenue, expenses, payroll, gross margin, and cash position move to a “deeper look” row below the fold. You close the laptop with a verb, not a number.
No magic. The same rules run the same way every time wherever they can, and the AI layer is labeled clearly wherever it adds judgment. Everything below is configurable.
All thresholds are defaults: raise the margin target if your business runs leaner, make the spend alert more sensitive if you want a louder watch, change the variance band if your contracts run tighter than the standard. Settings live with the org, not the user.
The Budget Architect runs your annual P&L all year. Where it earns its keep is here: answering the three questions every $1M+ owner is already running in their head, with numbers from your own ledger.
Generic SMB-finance tools watch the general ledger. They don't know a landscape company's normal November or which crew touched which job. RootControl sits underneath the GL. Every anomaly answers why.
The owner runs anomalies, the CPA closes the books, and three things keep one from blocking the other:
So your bookkeeper doesn't get a surprise in March.
Anomalies and overrides post back to the right account, nothing floats outside the ledger.
If the owner accepts a thin bid or snoozes an alert, the reason and the user stay on the record forever.
Working-paper format. Pull the period, hand it off, move on. No login dance for the bookkeeper.
Approved vs. total actuals stay separated end-to-end, so accruals don’t hide in the “pending” bucket at close.
Who saw it, who acted, what changed. A standalone trail per flag, defensible to a board or a reviewer.
Ask your account exec; we’ll send a redacted example so your CPA can review the format before signing on.
The scrubber runs every draft estimate through fixed, predictable rule checks before you can send it: margin problems, missing labor lines, and lines priced below cost. Each issue points to the specific line that triggered it, so you fix it in seconds or override with a reason on file. The exact rules and thresholds are listed in Under the hood on this page.
Same day. Detection runs nightly against a rolling baseline for each vendor and category, and one alert covers a spike, so your inbox doesn't get spammed. Every alert arrives with a one-sentence summary and a suggested action. The exact baseline and repeat-alert windows are listed in Under the hood on this page.
One watches a single job; the other watches the whole operating plan. Job Costing tracks an in-flight job against its estimate, with approved and pending actuals kept separate. Budget variance tracks monthly category totals against the annual P&L. Both run live, no month-end close required. The exact variance thresholds are listed in Under the hood on this page.
No. It builds a starter annual P&L from industry benchmark allocations (the split is shown on this page), calibrated to your historical revenue. You edit anything before locking it; after that, monthly variance tracking runs live against actuals from your invoices, timesheets, and PO/material entries. Edit again any time and the variance recomputes from that month forward.
30-minute walkthrough. Bring a real estimate that lost money, a vendor invoice that crept up, and last quarter's P&L. We'll show you exactly when RootControl would have flagged each one, or we'll buy you lunch.
Prefer to explore on your own? Start your 15-day free trial, no charge today.