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Cleaning

Recurring residential or commercial cleaning, usually run as routes with a small crew and tight margins per visit.

Six short steps. No email or account.

Family

Home services and trades

Work happens at the customer's property, usually with a crew and a vehicle.

Also covers

  • Residential cleaning
  • Commercial janitorial
  • Specialty cleaning
Priority decisions
10

Operating reality

What makes this different

The realities that change which tools can actually work for you.

  • Revenue is recurring, so route scheduling and missed-visit handling matter more than one-off job tracking.

  • Crews are often hourly and may not be native English speakers, which makes app simplicity a real selection criterion.

  • Customer keys, alarm codes and property access notes need somewhere secure and shared.

  • Workers' compensation is unavoidable once you have employees, and cleaning classifications are not cheap.

Where to start

The decisions that matter here, in order

You do not have to take them in this order, and you do not have to take all of them. This is where most businesses like yours start.

  1. 1
    Business insurance

    Cover the things that could end the business in one bad afternoon.

  2. 2
    Job and crew management

    Run jobs end to end: schedule, dispatch, complete, invoice.

  3. 3
    Invoicing

    Send the bill, and let people pay it without writing a cheque.

  4. 4
    Card payments

    Take a card in person, over the phone or through a link.

  5. 5
    Staff scheduling

    Build the rota, tell everyone, and handle the swaps.

  6. 6
    Time tracking

    Know the hours worked, and which job they belong to.

  7. 7
    Payroll

    Pay employees and handle the tax filings that come with it.

  8. 8
    Accounting software

    Track income and expenses so tax time is a report, not an archaeology dig.

  9. 9
    Reviews and reputation

    Ask happy customers to review you, and respond when they do.

  10. 10
    Capturing leads

    Catch enquiries from every channel and respond fast.

Your next step

Answer six short questions about your cleaning business: your team, where the work happens and what you want to fix first. You get an operating plan in the order to tackle it, with the must-haves and comparison points for each area.

Get my cleaning planNo email or account.

Answers

Common questions

What software does a cleaning business need?
Recurring residential or commercial cleaning, usually run as routes with a small crew and tight margins per visit. The decisions that matter most are 10 areas, starting with the ones tied to how the work actually gets done and paid for.
What makes running a cleaning business different?
Revenue is recurring, so route scheduling and missed-visit handling matter more than one-off job tracking. Crews are often hourly and may not be native English speakers, which makes app simplicity a real selection criterion. Customer keys, alarm codes and property access notes need somewhere secure and shared. Workers' compensation is unavoidable once you have employees, and cleaning classifications are not cheap.