Cleaning companies
Scheduling and contract systems for cleaning companies
Cleaning is a recurring business pretending to be a job business. Almost all the money is in contracts that repeat every week or fortnight, and almost all the difficulty is in scheduling the people who deliver them.
Rota - Monday
12 staff · 41 sites · 1 absence
An illustration of the kind of screen this builds towards - yours is built around how your cleaning company actually runs.
The reality
Where the time and money goes in a cleaning company
Rotas rebuilt every week by hand
Twelve cleaners across forty sites, someone is off sick, and the whole week has to be reshuffled in a spreadsheet before anyone can be told where they are going.
Nobody knows whether a clean actually happened
A client says the office was not done on Tuesday. You have no record either way, and the conversation becomes your word against theirs.
Invoicing forty contracts every month
Different frequencies, extras added mid-month, one client who paused for a fortnight. Working that out by hand takes days and gets things wrong.
Quotes take a visit for jobs that are largely standard
A three-bedroom end of tenancy is a known quantity. Driving out to look at it before quoting is often unnecessary and slows the answer down.
Keys and alarm codes tracked informally
Which cleaner has which key, which site has which alarm code, and what happens when somebody leaves. This is a security problem long before it is an admin one.
The approach
How we'd fix it
The scheduling side is the core of it. Contracts define what happens where and how often, and the rota generates itself from those rather than being rebuilt each week. When somebody calls in sick you reassign their sites, everybody affected gets told automatically, and the change is recorded. That alone usually saves a full day a week in a business of any size.
Around that sit the things that make contracts stick: cleaners checking in and out on site so there is a record of every visit, quality check photos on the sites that want them, and monthly invoices generated from what was actually delivered rather than from what was supposed to be. For new business, an instant online quote for standard jobs - end of tenancy priced by bedrooms, domestic cleans priced by size and frequency - answers the customer in seconds instead of days.
What we build
Built for cleaning companies
Contracts that schedule themselves
Weekly, fortnightly and monthly cleans generating the rota automatically rather than being rebuilt by hand.
Staff rotas across every site
Who is where, travel between sites, sickness cover and holidays, with everybody notified automatically when it changes.
Check-in and check-out on site
A record of every visit with times, so a disputed clean is a matter of record rather than of memory.
Instant quotes for standard jobs
End of tenancy by bedrooms, domestic by size and frequency, answered in seconds without a visit.
Automatic recurring invoicing
Monthly invoices generated from work actually delivered, with extras and pauses accounted for.
Key and access management
Which keys, fobs and codes are held by whom, with a proper handover record when staff change.
What changes
The difference it makes
- The weekly rota stops being a day of somebody's time
- Disputed cleans get resolved from records rather than argument
- Invoices go out on time and match what was actually delivered
- New enquiries get a price in seconds instead of after a site visit
In practice
A worked example: the Monday morning reshuffle
A commercial cleaning company with a dozen staff across forty-odd sites was losing most of a day every week to the rota. It was never the plan that took the time - it was the replanning. Somebody off sick on Monday morning meant reworking the week, then ringing round to tell everybody where they were now going.
Once contracts generated the rota, reassignment became a matter of moving sites between cleaners, with everyone affected notified automatically. The Monday morning reshuffle went from most of a day to about twenty minutes. Nothing about the cleaning changed; the business simply stopped paying somebody to rebuild a spreadsheet every week.
The systems behind it
What this is built from
Everything on this page is put together from the same handful of systems, shaped around how cleaning companies actually work.
Questions
Cleaning Companies - the questions I get asked
Can it build the rota from our contracts?
Yes, and that is where most of the saving is. Contracts define the site, the frequency and the hours, and the rota generates from them. You spend your time handling exceptions - sickness, holidays, one-off extras - rather than rebuilding the whole week from scratch every Monday.
How do we prove a clean actually happened?
Cleaners check in and out on site from their phone, which records the time and, if you want it, the location. On contracts where the client is particular, quality check photographs can be attached too. It turns a disagreement about last Tuesday into something you can simply look up.
Can invoicing be automated across recurring contracts?
Yes, and it is built from what was actually delivered rather than what was scheduled. Extras added mid-month, a fortnight paused for a client's holiday, an additional deep clean - all reflected in the invoice automatically, which removes both the work and the arguments.
Can customers get a price without a site visit?
For standard work, yes. End of tenancy priced by number of bedrooms and bathrooms, domestic cleans priced by property size and frequency, with an instant figure on screen. Commercial contracts still need a proper survey, but a large slice of enquiries are standard jobs where a fast answer wins the work.
How do we keep track of keys and alarm codes?
They become records in the system - which key or fob is held by which member of staff, which site it belongs to, and a handover log when it changes hands. Codes are stored with restricted access. It matters most on the day somebody leaves, which is exactly the day nobody has time to work it out from memory.
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Run a cleaning company? Let's have a look at it
Tell me how things work at the moment and I'll come back with a clear, fixed quote - and an honest view on whether it's worth the money. No pressure and no jargon.