What should you look for in cleaning business software? An honest buyer's guide
The eight things cleaning software has to do, the questions that get a straight answer from a salesperson, and when a spreadsheet is still the right call.
Updated 6 min read The Rostavo Team
For a cleaning company the job list is short: recurring schedules that generate themselves, a fast way to refill a cancelled clean, proof the cleaner was on site, invoices that come out of completed jobs, and accurate pay from the same hours. Everything else is preference.
What makes this category hard to compare is that almost nobody publishes a price, and the ones who do often price per cleaner, which means the bill grows every time you hire. That is the thing to look at first, before any feature list.
We make one of these products, so read this with that in mind. We have tried to write the guide we would want if we were buying, including the parts that do not favour us.
What does cleaning software actually have to do?
Recurring jobs that generate themselves. Most cleaning revenue is weekly, fortnightly or monthly on the same property. If you are copying last week's rota forward by hand, that is the first thing to fix. Property notes need to travel with the job: alarm code, where the key is, which dog is friendly, which room the client does not want touched.
A way to refill a cancelled clean fast. Someone calls in sick at seven. You want the open job in front of everyone who is free and near enough, with the first to accept taking it, rather than working down a phone list.
Proof of attendance. Check-in from the cleaner's phone, ideally geofenced so it confirms they were at the property rather than near it. This matters in a dispute, and it matters more for payroll, because it turns "how long were you there" into a recorded fact.
Invoicing from completed work. Finished jobs should become invoices without retyping, and clients should be able to pay by card. Overdue chasing should be automatic, because nobody does it reliably by hand.
Pay from the same hours as the invoice. If billing hours and payroll hours come from different places, they will disagree, and you will find out at month end.
A client-facing route in. Somewhere for a customer to request an extra clean, see what is booked and pay, without emailing you.
Somewhere for the documents. Insurance certificates, right-to-work, DBS or local equivalent, training. With expiry dates that warn you.
Reporting you will actually open. Revenue by client, utilisation per cleaner, which postcodes make money. Most systems bury this; the number that matters most is utilisation, because it tells you whether to hire.
What should you ask a salesperson?
Five questions. The answers tell you more than a demo.
- "What exactly am I charged for, and what happens when I double my cleaners?" Per-user pricing and per-office-seat pricing look similar at five people and diverge sharply at forty. Ask for the bill at your size and at twice your size.
- "Is there a minimum number of seats?" Several products in this category have a three-seat floor, which means a two-person operation pays for a person who does not exist.
- "What does it cost to leave, and can I export everything?" Ask specifically whether client history and job history come out in a usable format.
- "Will you move my existing data across, and is that included?" Migration quoted as a separate project is common and is often where the real cost sits.
- "What is the smallest company using this, and what do they pay?" If they cannot answer, you are not their customer and the product will not fit.
What do the pricing models cost as you grow?
Three models dominate, and the difference between them is the whole bill.
| Model | Ten cleaners, two in the office | Fifty cleaners, three in the office |
|---|---|---|
| Per person on your books | Twelve people billed | Fifty-three people billed |
| Per office seat | Two billed | Three billed |
| Flat tier by company size | Usually a step up somewhere in between | Depends entirely on where the tier boundaries sit |
Per-person pricing is the one to model carefully. It is often cheapest at the start, which is why it is offered, and it is the model that penalises exactly the thing you are trying to do. It also makes a bank of occasional relief cleaners expensive to keep, which quietly discourages you from having one.
For what it is worth, we price per office seat for this reason: your cleaners are free, however many you have. That is an argument in our favour, so weigh it accordingly, but model your own numbers either way.
Who else should you look at?
A list that only contains us would not be useful.
ShiftCare is well established in home care and does scheduling and billing well. It bills per staff member, so model the cost at your eventual headcount rather than today's. Their trial is short at seven days.
Connecteam is strong if your main problem is a deskless team: shift management, time clock and internal communication. It is not built around recurring property-based jobs, so the cleaning-specific parts are things you will configure rather than things you get.
Jobber and similar field-service tools handle quoting, scheduling and invoicing for home services generally, and are mature. They are built around jobs at addresses rather than around people on your books, so compliance and document tracking tend to be weaker.
A spreadsheet. Genuinely. Under about five cleaners and twenty regular properties, a well-kept spreadsheet plus a shared calendar costs nothing and loses to software mainly on invoicing. If that is you, the honest answer is to wait. The point where it stops working is usually when you hire your first coordinator, because a spreadsheet cannot be two people's source of truth at once.
When is it worth switching?
Three signals, and you want two of them before you move.
You are spending more than about three hours a week on the rota. That is the hour count where software pays for itself on time alone.
Something has been missed. A clean that did not happen, an invoice that never went out, a certificate that expired. One is an accident. Two in a quarter is a system problem.
You cannot answer a question about your own business. "Which clients are least profitable" or "how busy was Dawn last month" should take a minute. If it takes an afternoon, the data is in the wrong shape.
What does switching actually involve?
Less than people fear, and the fear is why agencies stay on spreadsheets for years longer than they should.
What has to move: clients and their properties, cleaners and their details, recurring schedules, rates, and any documents with expiry dates. What usually does not move: historic invoices, which most people keep in their accounting software anyway.
The realistic timeline for a company with twenty to thirty regular properties is an afternoon of setup and a couple of weeks running both in parallel until you trust it. Any vendor telling you it is instant has not migrated many accounts. Any vendor quoting six weeks is selling you a project you do not need.
See how Rostavo handles it for cleaning companies, or compare us against the alternatives with the price on the page.
A note on what we do and do not have: open jobs go out to available cleaners by email and by push notification on their phone. SMS broadcasting is on the roadmap and not built. We would rather tell you here than have you discover it after moving.