Hannah runs Reid Gardens out of a pickup in Norwich. Half her week is a 24 m² porcelain patio, a sleeper bed and new turf for a couple in Eaton, £6,000 all in. The other half is the dozen gardens she cuts, prunes and weeds every fortnight from March to November. The two halves earn similar money and need completely different invoices. Get the landscaping one wrong and you fund the paving yourself; get the maintenance one wrong and you spend Sunday evenings chasing £64 from people who like you. Here is both.
Two businesses in one van
Most landscapers and gardeners do some mix of these, and it helps to name them, because the money behaves differently:
| One-off landscaping | Regular maintenance | |
|---|---|---|
| Typical value | £1,500 to £20,000 | £40 to £300 a visit |
| Materials | Large, bought before you earn | Small: fuel, a bag of feed, green waste tipping |
| Documents | Quote, proforma for the deposit, stage invoice on bigger jobs, final invoice | One invoice a month per customer, or per visit |
| Risk | Funding materials; variations; a dispute at the end | Dozens of small debts drifting |
Hannah is not VAT registered; her turnover sits under the threshold (£90,000 at the time of writing), so there is no VAT anywhere on her invoices. If you are registered, the same structures apply with VAT added to the whole supply; see invoicing when you are not VAT registered for the line between the two.
Landscaping: the deposit pays for the paving
The Eaton patio needs £2,100 of porcelain slabs, two skips, a lorry of MOT type 1 and sharp sand, oak sleepers, topsoil and 40 m² of turf before Hannah has laid a single slab. Nobody should fund that from their own account. Her quote said 30% on acceptance, and once the customers, the Fentons, said yes she sent a proforma invoice for £1,752 (30% of the £5,840 quote). A proforma says "this is what is due before we start" without pretending anything has been supplied yet, which is the honest way to ask for money up front.
Three things she does with every deposit:
- Sizes it to the materials, not to a round number. If the slabs alone are 35% of the job, the deposit is 35%.
- Keeps the money accessible. If the Fentons' house sale falls through and the job is cancelled, the deposit is owed back less anything she has already bought at their request. Spending it on the previous job's paving is how landscapers end up in the local paper.
- Gets the 14-day request in writing. She quoted in the Fentons' garden, so this is an off-premises consumer contract with a 14-day cancellation right under the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013. Her quote acceptance asks the customer to confirm they want work to start within 14 days, so she can charge for work done if they cancel. She also holds the slab order until the 14 days are up where the lead time allows.
For jobs over about £8,000, or anything longer than two weeks, add a stage invoice at a visible milestone, "base and edgings complete" for a patio, "hard landscaping complete" before planting. The method is covered in deposits and staged payments for tradespeople.
Landscaping: the final invoice
Eight working days later the patio is jointed, the sleeper bed is filled and the turf is down. Hannah walks the garden with Mrs Fenton, agrees that one slab near the drain needs re-bedding, fixes it the next morning, and sends the final invoice from the driveway. It shows the whole job, the one variation they agreed by text (an extra step up to the lawn, £160), and deducts the deposit.
Reid Gardens · Hannah Reid, sole trader · Invoice INV-0128 · Date 12 November 2026 · From QUO-0097 · Due 7 days
Bill to: Mr and Mrs Fenton, 22 Mile End Road, Eaton, Norwich · Job: Rear garden patio, raised bed and lawn
| Description | Qty | Unit price | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|
| Excavate existing patio and lawn area to depth, load and dispose | 1 | £680.00 | £680.00 |
| Skip hire, 8 yd, two loads | 2 | £260.00 | £520.00 |
| MOT type 1 sub-base, sharp sand and cement, delivered and laid | 1 | £520.00 | £520.00 |
| Porcelain paving 600 x 600, supply and lay on full mortar bed, jointed | 24 m² | £95.00 | £2,280.00 |
| Linear drainage channel to patio edge, connected to existing gully | 1 | £260.00 | £260.00 |
| Oak sleeper raised bed, 6 m, two courses, lined and filled with topsoil | 1 | £540.00 | £540.00 |
| Topsoil, level and lay turf to new lawn | 40 m² | £14.00 | £560.00 |
| Plants to agreed planting plan, supplied and planted | 1 | £480.00 | £480.00 |
| Variation agreed by text 7 Nov: additional sleeper step from patio to lawn | 1 | £160.00 | £160.00 |
| Total for the job | £6,000.00 | ||
| Less deposit received 20 Oct (PRO-0044) | -£1,752.00 | ||
| Balance now due | £4,248.00 | ||
Notes: Not VAT registered. Turf: water daily for the first two weeks and avoid walking on it for three. Pay by card using the Pay button in the email or by bank transfer to the details below. Workmanship guaranteed 12 months; plants guaranteed to establish for 6 months if the watering notes are followed.
Two things to notice. The per-m² lines show the quantity and the rate, because a customer who can see "24 m² at £95" does not wonder what £2,280 was for. And the variation is its own line with a date, because it was agreed by a text that Hannah still has. The approach to extras is in invoicing variations and extras on a job.
Maintenance: one invoice a month, not twelve a week
Hannah's twelve regulars get a visit every fortnight, two hours each, at £32 an hour. Invoicing each visit would be 24 invoices a month, most of them for £64, each one a chance to be forgotten. Instead she sends twelve invoices on the first working day of each month, each covering the previous month's visits. The structure is always the same:
- A line per visit with the date ("Garden maintenance visit, 3 Oct, 2 hours at £32"), or one line for the month with the dates in the description.
- A line for green waste removal if she tips it, at a flat rate per visit.
- Occasional extras as their own lines: a bag of lawn feed, a hedge cut that was agreed as an extra, a new plant the customer asked for.
- Seven-day terms, card button in the email, bank details at the bottom.
Save your standard lines ("Maintenance visit, 2 hours", "Green waste removal") as saved items once, and each monthly invoice is a few taps: pick the customer, who fills in as you type, add the saved lines, change the quantities and dates, send. Twelve invoices before the kettle has boiled.
Pricing tip for regulars: quote a per-visit price rather than a vague hourly figure, and review it once a year in writing, usually in February before the season starts. "From March, visits are £68" by email is accepted without fuss; a surprise on the April invoice is not.
Agents, landlords and management companies
A good chunk of maintenance work comes from letting agents keeping rental gardens tidy, and from residents' management companies for communal grounds. Treat them differently from homeowners:
- Property or site address on every invoice, separate from the billing address. An agent cannot pay "grass cutting" without knowing which of 150 houses it was.
- Their PO or works order number on the invoice if they issue one; see purchase orders for how they work.
- Agree the terms up front, usually 30 days, and expect to chase at 31.
- You have more rights. These are business customers, so the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998 applies: statutory interest at 8% above base rate and a fixed sum (£40 for a debt under £1,000, at the time of writing). For Mrs Fenton it does not; a court can award interest at its discretion, but you cannot add the fixed sum.
The detail is in invoicing landlords and letting agents.
Weather, the season and cash flow
Gardening income is lumpy: flat out April to October, thin in January. Two invoicing habits smooth it a little. First, invoice maintenance monthly on the dot, so the money is predictable even if the weather is not; a rained-off visit is rescheduled, not charged, unless your terms say otherwise. Second, land landscaping deposits in the quiet months by quoting winter projects in autumn, with the deposit covering the materials; the proforma does the asking for you.
And on days the rain really does win, use them for the paperwork: send the month's invoices, check who is overdue, export the quarter for your accountant. Keep invoices, receipts and bank records for at least five to six years, and bear in mind Making Tax Digital for Income Tax applies from April 2026 for the self-employed with income over £50,000 (lower thresholds follow in 2027 and 2028), so a tidy monthly rhythm is worth building now.
The Fentons paid their £4,248 by card the afternoon the invoice arrived, standing on the new patio. Eleven of Hannah's twelve regulars paid within the week. The twelfth got a friendly reminder on the 9th and paid on the 10th, with an apology about a holiday. That is what landscaping and gardening invoicing looks like when the documents do the work: a deposit that pays for the paving, a final invoice that explains itself, and a monthly rhythm that nobody has to think about.
Do this in SendInvoice
Quote the garden, raise the proforma for the deposit, send the final invoice from the driveway with a Pay button, and run your monthly maintenance invoices from saved items in minutes. Free to create and preview; £5 a month to send, take card payments and see every customer's status at a glance.
Create a free invoice See the £5/month planFrequently asked questions
How much deposit should a landscaper take?
Enough to cover the materials you have to buy before you earn anything: paving, aggregates, sleepers, turf and skips are the big ones. For most jobs that works out at 25-40% of the quote. There is no legal maximum for consumer work, but keep the money accessible, because it is still owed back if the job falls through. Raise it on a proforma invoice, not a normal one.
Should I invoice garden maintenance per visit or per month?
Per month, for regulars. One invoice on the first working day of the month for the previous month's visits, with each visit as a line or the hours totalled, is easier for the customer to pay and halves your admin. Per-visit invoices suit one-off tidy-ups and new customers until you trust each other.
Can I charge for a visit when the weather stops me working?
Only if your terms say so. Most gardeners do not charge for a rained-off maintenance visit and simply reschedule. On landscaping projects, a day lost to weather after you have turned up is a cost; decide in your quote whether that is charged, and at what rate, so neither of you is guessing when it happens.
Do I have to charge VAT on gardening work?
Only if you are VAT registered, which depends on your turnover (the threshold is £90,000 at the time of writing). If you are registered, VAT applies to the whole supply, labour and materials, at the standard rate for ordinary garden work. If you are not registered, do not add or mention VAT. Landscapers with big material costs can cross the threshold sooner than they expect, so watch the rolling twelve-month figure.
What if the customer changes the plan half way through the landscaping?
Agree the change and its price in writing before you do it, even by text, then put it on the final invoice as its own line with the date it was agreed. An extra step, a wider path or a different plant list is normal; an unwritten extra is where the end-of-job argument starts.
Can I charge late payment interest to a gardening customer?
If the customer is a business, a landlord's company, a letting agent or a management company, the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998 lets you add statutory interest and a fixed sum. For a private homeowner it does not; a court can award interest at its discretion, but you cannot add the fixed £40 sum. Clear terms and a prompt reminder are usually enough.
