Know your numbers.
Off your own book.

A report is a reading, not a spreadsheet you build on Sunday

Most cleaning businesses have numbers. They are in an invoice folder, a bank statement and somebody’s head, and pulling them together takes an evening that nobody has, which is why it happens twice a year and usually because an accountant asked.

The figures here are not entered anywhere. They come off the cleans, the invoices, the pay rates and the stock movements you were recording anyway, so the report is a reading of the business rather than a second copy of it. That is the whole difference: a spreadsheet is out of date the moment the week moves, and this is not.

It is arranged as five rooms rather than a wall of charts. Overview is the one screen. Money holds the financial summary, profitability, costs, sales and the monthly client reports. Operations holds the work and the stock. People holds the staff and the clients. Compliance holds health and safety and waste. Any of them can be read over the last seven days, thirty days, ninety days or twelve months.

Margin on delivered work, and the coverage line under it

The profitability report is the one worth understanding before you trust it. It is margin on delivered work: what a completed clean was worth against what it cost to deliver, by client, by site, and clean by clean with the thinnest first.

Cost comes from one of two places. Either a cost you have recorded against that clean yourself, which exists for the jobs the simple model gets wrong, two cleaners or a subcontractor or a materials-heavy deep clean; or the hours actually clocked between starting and completing it, multiplied by the pay rate on file for whoever did it. It is deliberately not the scheduled length, because costing a job at its estimate makes every overrun invisible, and overruns are most of what this report is for.

A clean whose cost cannot be established is excluded from every margin figure and counted as unrated, never folded in at zero cost, which would read as one hundred per cent margin and quietly flatter the whole report. So the figure sits under a coverage line saying what share of your completed work it covers, and a list of why the rest is missing: no pay rate on file for whoever did them, never clocked in and out so the hours are unknown, or no value recorded on the clean. Nothing rated at all is shown as a different answer from a business running at zero margin, because they are different answers.

Beside it, and deliberately beside it, is the costs report: the whole business, money in against money out, including the expenses that never touch a job. Reading either without the other is how an owner comes to believe a sixty-two per cent job margin is sixty-two per cent of the business. Both are owner-only, because both read pay rates.

The figures your accountant actually asks for

Every table exports to CSV in one click, and the invoice export comes in two extra shapes: one built to Xero’s own documented invoice-import template and one to QuickBooks Online UK’s, with dates written the way both read them and one row per line item.

Two fields are deliberately left blank in those exports: Xero’s account code and QuickBooks’ product match. Both belong to your own chart of accounts, and CleanFlo has no way of knowing what yours looks like, so they are left for the person doing the import to map rather than guessed at and wrong in three hundred rows.

A report can also be printed as it stands, which is the version that goes in front of somebody rather than into a spreadsheet, and clients on a monthly report get their own: a summary of the month’s visits and hours on site, reviewed by you and sent, or set to go out on its own.

What this does not do

There is no live accounting connection. Nothing signs into Xero, QuickBooks or Sage on your behalf, nothing pushes an invoice into a ledger, and there is no sync to break at the end of a VAT quarter. What there is, is an export in the shape each of them reads, which the person doing your books imports and reviews.

The hours in the operational reports are estimated from the clean as scheduled rather than taken from a verified timesheet. Cleaners start and complete work on their phone, so those stamps are real, and they are what the profitability report costs from; but the workload figures are a measure of how much work went to whom, not evidence in a payroll dispute.

Nothing reports by area or by round. Margin comes out by client, by site and clean by clean, and no report groups a street, a postcode or a whole Wednesday round together, so "is this round still worth keeping" is a question you answer by reading the sites on it.

There is no forecasting, no target-setting and nothing that tells you where the business should grow next. It says what happened and what it came to. The judgement is yours.