A lawn care contract specifies the duties and responsibilities of clients and the lawn care business.
The lawn care business’s responsibility is to draft it well and get it signed by the client with proper consent. It assures that you will be paid for completing the services specified in the agreement.
In case of any service dispute during or after the service, this agreement or contract is what will come to your rescue. So, let’s learn more about it.
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Simply put, a lawn care contract is an agreement between the lawn care service provider and the client. It is prepared to solidify the service and payout expectations of both parties.
A lawn service contract is a legal instrument to build a relationship of trust between the two parties. Apart from the payment information, this legal document also consists of party contact details, services offered, and the process of handling legal disputes.
Upon physical or electronic signatures from both parties, this document becomes enforceable by legal terms, as all of the clauses in it are mutually agreed upon.
The benefits of a lawn service contract in the landscaping business are:
Every time you get a project, it should be a process within your system to get reasonable lawn care contracts with the client’s and your company’s consent.
Make sure to address any challenges or issues that might arise at the time of executing a service. Your company should always have a legal consultant to help you out with every bit of the essentials that should persist in such legal documents.
A lawn care business should be precise enough to not miss out on any essential elements in the contract. It is because, to make the contract enforceable and approved by the governing law, some mandatory inclusions should be made on priority.
The essentials that you should include in this legal agreement are
These are the elements that you must include in a lawn care agreement. Apart from that, there are a few practices that you should keep in mind to make no mistakes while preparing such legal documents.
Here are the five practices that you should never overlook while creating your lawn contract:
Even though you are aware of what elements you got to write in the contract, you still need to be strict on its structure. You cannot just haphazardly input the elements in an unstructured order. It will undergo an acceptance denial at a law firm or during legal proceedings.
Here is the structure you should follow while writing your lawn service agreement. The elements mentioned below are in the order in which they are to be written:
Mention the names of both parties at first. Here is a sample,
The landscaping contract is entered into “ Date ” by and between “ Contractor’s Name ” at “Contractor’s Address” and “Client’s Name” at “ Client’s Address” , collectively referred to hereinafter as ‘Parties’.
In this part, both the parties will give their acceptance to all the terms and conditions that are specified in the contract.
It is the section where you will be mentioning all of the lawn care services that the client has requested. Add it to the listed form for a better understanding of the client. You can provide a description of each service on the list to clarify what you are offering, such as the use of equipment, manpower, time of completion, and others.
You can define lawn maintenance scopes in this section as well. Your business might claim to offer regular maintenance to the clients, but the term ‘regular’ can have misinterpretations, for which it is better to define the period of lawn maintenance for better understanding.
Apart from that, you must also mention the warranties and guarantees of your services at the end of this section. Mention any additional charges you would demand for an extended warranty or guarantee period.
Mention the undersigned start date, the contract’s end date, and the due date for the client to clear the payments. Also mention the available payment options, amount, and modes of payment (in full or in installments). If in installments, then mention all the due dates for the payments.
The client and lawn service provider can negotiate the payment amount and the mode of payment before preparing the contract to add those clauses. You can consider adding an invoice template under this section.
The contractor will be responsible for mentioning all the equipment and material that are to be used in carrying out the services. You can mention it in the list format.
Both parties can call for amending the agreement any time before or during the service. But it needs the consent of both the client and the contractor to make those changes.
If any party seeks early termination of the contract, then the same should be provided in writing.
Liability limitation is the contract clause that specifies the damages that one party claims not to impose on the other party, with respect to the terms and conditions mentioned within the contract.
In the lawn service contract, parties agree on being harmless to one another, throughout the contract or service period, which includes the officers and employees of the company as well.
A legal fee is to be mentioned in the contract. Either party agrees to pay the same if they violate the contract.
If the agreement or contract is found to have any invalid or unenforceable section, then that part will be severed or rejected, while the other parts will remain valid.
It is an important section for you to include!
Both parties agree that the lawn care agreement is written and entered under the governance of local, federal, or state laws.
Large contracts are essential when you are getting a project for the long term or for working at multiple sites.
If that is the case, you must prefer taking additional measures along with the basic contract guidelines. You will have to procure insurance coverage and might also have to accommodate certain client requests to the contract clauses.
It is essential for commercial agreements. And when commercial projects are involved, it is better to hire a legal services consultant to review the entire agreement thoroughly to avoid missing out on any vital points.
There might be some conditional provisions from your end that should also be added to the agreement.
Suppose you want some other people or another business to be partners with you in completing the commercial landscaping services, then you need to mention them as additional parties in the contract.
The lawn care provider needs to mention the amount the commercial clients need to pay at the end of every month. The consequences for failure of payments should also be mentioned in simple words.
You need to add a provision to the contract to specify the response if you miss fulfilling the duties mentioned in the contract within the decided lawn care schedule.
For instance, this provision might include, “If the lawn care provider, for any reason, fails to fulfill their responsibilities, services, and duties as per the lawn care schedule, then they should contact the property owner and reschedule the job for them with an incentive discount.”
You can integrate your business into a digital tool for operating most of your management services through the software portal.
Apart from the management practices, you can also seek electronic or digital signatures from your clients over the contracts.
After you write and upload your contract to your digital tool, you can send the signature link to the customer through email for them to read and sign it instantly.
You don’t have to visit them physically to get the signatures, saving you a lot of business time.
If you are a new business and have less time to invest in preparing a structure or writing out a complete contract from scratch, then you can always prefer to use a lawn care contract template to ease the job.
You can download and edit them to fill in your specifications, terms, and other valuable information. You can also add or remove sections from them to customize the contract to your will.
A few lawn service contract templates have been provided for you in the next section of this article. Feel free to use a lawn service contract template out of them and get going with your first project.
