Grow-on costing: what a plant actually cost you
The supplier invoice for a tray of plugs is the smallest part of what a saleable plant costs. By the time a ten-centimetre annual reaches the retail bench it carries weeks of soil, pots, tags, fertilizer, heat and labour, and books that value it at plug cost understate inventory all winter, then overstate margin all spring. We build a simple grow-on costing model for each crop: direct inputs plus a defensible share of greenhouse overhead, so the inventory figure in the statements describes what is actually on the benches.
That figure matters beyond tidiness. Inventory is valued at the lower of cost and market for tax, the operating line is often margined against it, and spring gross margin is only as honest as the cost carried into it. One boundary worth naming: a grower who retails what it grows sits near the farming definition, and the special farm cash-basis rules belong on our farm pages; a garden centre buying in finished product for resale is a retailer on accrual, inventory and all.
Shrink is an event, not a year-end surprise
Living inventory dies on a schedule no other retail category has, so we record the deaths when they happen. A weekly dump list, signed off by whoever runs the greenhouse, turns compost-pile reality into a costed writeoff in the same week. Waiting for the year-end count to discover four months of losses leaves you pricing off margins that never existed. Here is how the events on the bench should land in the books:
| What happens on the bench | What the books record |
|---|---|
| Plugs and liners arrive from the propagator | Invoice cost into inventory, by crop |
| Weeks of growing on: media, containers, heat, labour | Costs capitalized into the crop's unit value |
| Disease or frost takes a bench | Costed writeoff from that week's dump list |
| Late-June markdowns to clear annuals | Writedown to net realizable value, margin reported honestly |
| Finished stock moves to the landscape crew for an install | Interdivision transfer at cost, not a retail sale |
The till, the departments and the bank
Daily POS closeouts should tie to the bank without a Saturday-night mystery line. Whether the front end runs NCR Counterpoint, Lightspeed or Square, we map its departments into QuickBooks Online so green goods, hard goods, giftware and the landscape division each show their own sales and margin, and we reconcile the tax collected against how each SKU was coded. The zero-rated seedling question that sits behind that coding gets its full treatment on our garden centre tax services page.
Behind the till, Dext captures the supplier paperwork and Plooto pays the growers and hard-goods vendors on terms you chose rather than terms that happened. All of it is one engagement: End-to-End Accounting covers the bookkeeping, payroll, financial reporting and tax filings under one roof, with a monthly close that still happens in May.
Casual labour, paid as payroll
The weekend cashiers and waterers you add for spring are employees, and the CRA's phrase "casual labour" does not create a category that skips the rules. Done properly, the seasonal crew is simple:
- T4s for everyone, however short the stint, with CPP and EI withheld. One useful detail: CPP contributions only begin at age 18, which matters for a crew heavy with students, while EI applies from the first dollar.
- TD1 forms on day one and an ROE issued promptly when the season winds down, so nobody's EI claim stalls in July.
- Ontario employment standards followed as written: the student minimum wage differs from the general rate, and public holiday pay applies to seasonal staff too.
- WSIB coverage reviewed, especially where a landscape crew works on client property under a different classification than the retail floor.
Cash paid to helpers with no slips is the finding that starts a payroll exam, and it is entirely avoidable. If a review letter does arrive, CRA Audit & Review Support answers it from working papers we built, not from memory.
Through winter we use the quiet months well: costing models refreshed, the chart of accounts tightened, and the reporting rebuilt so that when the eight-week window opens you are reading numbers, not entering them. The planning that wraps around those numbers, cash, staffing and the heating contract, is Fractional CFO ground, and we run both from the same books here in Mississauga.
