Cleaning & janitorial
Bookkeeping for cleaning and janitorial businesses
Cleaning is a business of small recurring amounts. A contract priced five dollars too low is invisible in any single month and expensive across a year.
Most cleaning businesses have a good sense of their total revenue and very little visibility into which contracts earn. The cost of any single visit is small, so an underpriced client never announces itself — it just quietly takes the margin out of the month.
Getting per-client profitability requires only one discipline: labor recorded against the job it was worked on. Everything else follows from that.
Where the books go wrong
What we look at first
No per-contract profitability
Revenue in total looks fine. One long-standing client priced years ago can be losing money every visit and never be noticed.Travel time unaccounted for
Drive time between jobs is paid labor that belongs to the route. Left out, every job looks more profitable than it is.Supplies bought in bulk, used everywhere
A quarterly supply run spread across dozens of clients needs a sensible allocation rather than landing entirely in one month.Cleaners paid as contractors without records
Whatever the arrangement, W-9s belong on file before the first payment and payments need tracking by person through the year.
What we do each month
- Revenue recorded per client or contract, not just in total
- Labor hours, including travel time, allocated to the jobs worked
- Supplies and equipment recorded and allocated on a consistent basis
- Recurring billing reconciled, so a missed invoice is caught the same month
- Contractor payments tracked against W-9s, with the year's 1099 figures ready in January
- Bank and credit card accounts reconciled, with vehicle costs kept separate from personal use
Setting up QuickBooks for it
Each client is a customer in QuickBooks Online and each recurring service a scheduled invoice, so billing is automatic and a missed month is obvious.
Where the crew already logs hours in a scheduling app, the mapping into QuickBooks is set up once so labor lands against the right client.
Supply purchases are coded to a single cost of services account and allocated periodically, rather than being split by guesswork at the register.
Carey is a QuickBooks Online Advanced ProAdvisor, so a file can be set up, cleaned up or migrated as part of the same engagement — see QuickBooks services.
Reporting
The numbers worth watching
Margin per contract
Revenue less the labor and supplies that job consumed. The report that finds the contracts due for a price conversation.Revenue per labor hour
A single figure that shows whether pricing is keeping up with wages.Client retention against acquisition cost
Recurring revenue is only valuable if it recurs; what it costs to replace a lost client is worth knowing.
Questions we are asked
Can you show us which clients are not worth keeping?
We can show you what each contract earns after the labor and supplies it consumes, which is usually enough to make the answer obvious. Whether to raise the price, change the scope or let a client go is a business decision, and it belongs to you.
Our cleaners are paid per job. Does that work in the books?
Yes. Per-job pay records cleanly as long as each payment carries the job it was for, which is also what makes per-contract margin possible. We set the file up so that happens as part of normal entry rather than as extra work.
Start with a conversation
Let's look at your books together
Tell us about your church or business and where your bookkeeping stands. Carey will follow up to arrange a consultation, and you'll receive a written scope before any work begins.