The end result looked good, but I can't recommend ...

The end result looked good, but I can't recommend Rasmussen because I believe that their billed hours were dishonest. The way they track hours/people is flawed and doesn't give the customer any confidence in the service they're paying for. I hired them to come and clean out our flower beds and put down weed barrier in May and I'm still dealing with the office about the bill. When I first hired them the reviews here weren't bad...I see over the last few months many others have had similar experiences to my own.

My first issue with the company is that they don't come out to look at your project to bid. They give you hourly rates based on the number of people who will be on the job and tell you that there will be either a 2 or 3 man crew. It worried me that they couldn't give an estimate or tell me exactly how many people I was paying for, so I kept track of how many hours and people were there (luckily I work from home often and have outdoor cameras) to get a gauge of cost. The first day out they finally looked at the job and told me it would be a full day and that they'd be there until dusk to get it done. The crew left at 2 pm and never came back. I called the office and they let me know they'd be back a couple of days later first thing in the morning. The crew showed up at noon, worked until 5 and when I called the office because the job wasn't complete as estimated, they said they needed another half day. Two more half days later the job was finally complete.

My second issue is with being overcharged. The invoice I got reflected $1,300 more in labor than I had tracked and I noted that on each day the bill reflected 3 crew members, when for the most part there were only 2. I was also billed a full day (for 3 people) for the last day when in reality, 2 people were there for a half day finishing up. There wasn't enough work left for a full day regardless. In working with the office, they've given their own explanations for why I might have only seen 2 people and offered to make one adjustment for a crew member who I told them had been sitting in our neighborhood gas station parking lot for two hours one of the days, but they don't seem to be considering that the crews might actually be inflating hours and manpower. Like another customer, I also had an issue where they worked on a section of the yard I explicitly told the office and crew I didn't want worked on. I originally let that go because it was an obvious lack of communication from one crew to another and not as big of a deal as other issues on the bill, but if they charged 2 hours for 3 guys for that work, that's a $270 miscommunication.

My suggestion to Rasmussen is to check in and out with the customer each day letting them know how many people are there and allowing the customer to verify or correct them, especially for larger projects. They also must be able to bid a job and provide an estimate that they can stick close to. We all know that big projects sometimes end up being more complex and taking longer than anticipated, but they've been around long enough they should be able to give ball park estimates or a range. Based on these reviews, hopefully they'll implement some of the suggestions from dissatisfied customers to improve their service and billing.