Landscape Lighting Software Built for Install and Service Work

What is landscape lighting software?

Landscape lighting software is one system that holds your saved fixture prices, the estimate you built from them, the homeowner's acceptance, the photos of what went in at each property, and the service visits that follow, instead of that living across a quoting spreadsheet, a phone camera roll, and a calendar reminder you set yourself.

Lighting is a different shape of work from mowing, and that is the part general field-service software gets wrong. A mowing route is the same stop every week at a small ticket. A lighting job is a several-thousand-dollar install sold off a night demo, and then a property you visit once or twice a year for re-aiming, lamp swaps, and timer adjustments for as long as you hold the account. The money is front-loaded and the relationship is long, which is the opposite of the weekly-recurring model most tools are built around.

TerraScape AI is built for landscaping and green-industry crews of 1 to 15. You get client and property records with per-property notes and job photos, a saved Products and Services price list you build estimates from, Stripe-native estimates with a public acceptance link, drag-and-drop scheduling with route planning and route templates, recurring jobs for service visits, built-in texting and email with consent tracking, and a job-level cost and profit view. The piece most tools do not have is an owner-facing AI agent called Zentra that runs the office side on command.

Here's the difference that matters. Zentra is not an autopilot working your client list behind your back. You command it and it confirms before it acts. You say "send the Kellerman estimate" or "text tomorrow's service stops that we're starting at 9," Zentra drafts the work, and you read what it did before anything leaves the building. You stay in control. The evening admin is what goes away.

Grounds maintenance work runs on a seasonal, weather-bound calendar, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Lighting sits on top of that season rather than inside it, which is exactly why it tends to fall out of a schedule built around weekly cuts.

How do you quote a lighting install without rebuilding the price list every time?

You save each fixture type as a line item once, with its own unit price, and then build the estimate by picking items and quantities. Twelve path lights, four uplights, one transformer, 300 feet of wire. The estimate assembles itself from prices you already decided on, so you are not re-deriving your own numbers on the tailgate at 8 PM.

That is the whole trick, and it is the difference between a proposal that takes forty minutes and one that takes six.

Here's how it works in TerraScape:

• Build the price list once. The Products and Services list, under Settings, holds saved line items with a name, a description, and a unit price. Units include flat, per hour, per square foot, per linear foot, and per cubic yard, so wire by the foot and fixtures by the piece both fit the same list.
• Assemble the estimate by name. Line items pull into an estimate by the name you gave them, so a well light is priced the same way on every proposal you send. Your pricing stops drifting job to job.
• Adjust for the property, not from scratch. A steep front yard or a long run back to the transformer is a quantity change, not a rewrite.
• Let Zentra do the typing. Tell Zentra to build the estimate and it drafts the lines for you to check. Every change Zentra makes to the price list is undoable from the same screen, so experimenting with your pricing is not a one-way door.
• Keep the margin visible. The job costing view puts material and labor against what you priced, which matters more on a fixture-heavy install than it does on a $55 mow.

The estimate software page covers the estimating flow in more depth.

How does a homeowner accept a lighting proposal?

They open a link and accept it themselves, without printing anything, signing anything, or waiting for you to drive back out. The estimate you send carries a public acceptance link, so the decision happens on their phone on their schedule.

This matters more in lighting than in most green-industry work, because the buying moment is unusual. You did the demo after dark. The homeowner and their spouse were both standing in the yard, and both of them were sold. Then everybody went inside and it is now four days later.

A shorter path from demo to yes:

• Send it that night. The estimate goes out from your phone while the demo is still the most recent thing that happened in that house.
• Let them accept without you. The acceptance link means the yes does not have to be scheduled around another visit or a callback.
• Follow up without nagging. Zentra can draft the follow-up text on the estimates that have gone quiet, and you approve the ones worth sending.
• Turn the yes into work. An accepted estimate becomes the job you schedule, so nothing gets retyped between the sale and the install date.

One honest note on what this is. Sending a new estimate or invoice runs on a connected payment provider, so you connect Stripe or QuickBooks Online on the billing page before the first one goes out. The public acceptance link is on the Stripe path. Importing your old quote and invoice history needs no provider at all.

There is no separate contract module, and there is not going to be one. A lighting proposal in TerraScape is an estimate, which is the same document you were already sending.

How do you keep a record of what is installed at each property?

You keep it on the property itself, as notes and job photos attached to that client's record, so the next person who pulls up to the house can see what is in the ground before they get out of the truck.

Be clear on what this is and is not. TerraScape does not have a fixture-level inventory database with wattage fields and warranty expiry dates. What it has is a property record that holds your notes and the photos from every visit, which is what most lighting crews are actually keeping in a phone camera roll today. The gain is that the photos live on the property instead of in a chronological blur of 4,000 images.

What that looks like in practice:

• Photograph the install, not just the finish. Trench runs and transformer locations photographed before backfill are the pictures you want in three years when a run goes dark.
• Write the specifics into the property note. Transformer size and location, the count and type of fixtures by zone, the timer settings you left it on. It is a paragraph, and it is the paragraph that saves a service call.
• Shoot the night photo. The finished look after dark is a service reference and the best sales asset you own for the next street over.
• Keep the history on the client. Past jobs, past estimates, and past invoices sit on the same client record, so "what did we do here in 2024" is a lookup rather than an excavation.

The client management page covers how property records and history are organized.

How do you run annual lighting service visits?

You set them as recurring jobs, group them geographically into a service round, and save that round as a route template you reuse every year. The visits stop depending on you remembering them.

This is where lighting revenue quietly leaks. The install was profitable and the service is where the account either becomes an annuity or becomes a house you drove past for four years without billing. Nobody loses a maintenance visit on purpose. They lose it because it lived in a calendar reminder that got snoozed in March.

Here's how a service round runs:

• Set the visit as a recurring job. Twice a year, once a year, whatever you sold. It lands on the schedule without you re-entering it.
• Batch the round by geography. Service visits are short and spread out, which makes drive time the entire cost. The route optimizer sequences the day so you are not crossing town twice.
• Save the round as a route template. The order you drive the spring re-aim is close to the order you drive the fall timer adjustment. Save it once and reuse it.
• Tell the client you are coming. Campaigns and templates on the communications page are where the notice goes out, or you tell Zentra to draft the texts for tomorrow's stops in one pass and approve them.
• See what is still owed to the round. Completed stops drop off, so the remainder is the real answer to whether you are on schedule.

A note on timing. The two visits that matter are the spring pass after mulch has buried half your path lights and the fall pass when the clocks change and every timer is suddenly an hour wrong. Both are calendar-driven rather than weather-driven, which makes them easy to schedule far ahead and easy to forget entirely.

How do you bill a lighting maintenance plan?

You set a recurring billing plan on the Stripe path and TerraScape sends the client an invoice on the cycle you chose. Annual, semi-annual, or monthly, the invoice goes out on schedule instead of waiting on you to remember it.

Say what this is precisely, because the word "recurring" gets used loosely across this category. A recurring plan in TerraScape sends an invoice every cycle. It does not silently charge a card you have on file. The client still opens the invoice and pays it, which is the behavior most homeowners on a maintenance plan expect anyway.

How the money side runs:

• Recurring plans are on the Stripe path. Connect Stripe on the billing page to use them. The QuickBooks Online path does two-way accounting sync but does not carry recurring plans.
• Bill the install separately from the plan. The install is a one-time estimate that converts to an invoice. The plan is the thing that repeats. Keeping them separate keeps the year's revenue readable.
• Chase less. Payment follow-ups can go out on the invoices that have aged, and Zentra will draft them on your say-so, which is the whole subject of the late payment reminders page.
• Watch the fee. Card payments carry a 0.75% platform fee on top of standard Stripe processing, and that platform fee is waived when you connect QuickBooks. Texting and email are included at no charge.

What does TerraScape AI cost for a lighting business?

$24.99 a month after a 7-day free trial, with unlimited employees, no tiers, and no feature locks. A card is collected to start the trial, and you can cancel anytime. There is no contract and no cancellation fee.

That is the entire price. Estimates, the saved price list, scheduling, route templates, recurring jobs, job costing, texting, and Zentra are all in it. Nothing on this page sits behind an upgrade.

The two costs that sit outside the subscription are both usage-based and both optional. Card payments carry a 0.75% platform fee on top of standard Stripe processing, waived when you connect QuickBooks Online. Texting and email are included free for businesses.

Here's the comparison that actually matters for a small lighting crew. Most field-service tools price per user from the first seat, which means the month you put a second installer on the schedule your software bill moves. A three-person lighting crew on a per-seat tool is frequently paying more for software than for the truck's insurance. Flat pricing means adding your installer to the schedule costs nothing.

Every account also gets a 30-minute setup call where the team at TerraScape AI imports your client list and gets Zentra running, so you are not starting from an empty screen.