The stain came out.
The photograph is what proves it.

The pair of photographs is the product

Nobody buys a carpet clean. They buy the difference between how a room looked on Tuesday morning and how it looked on Tuesday afternoon, and unless somebody photographed both, that difference stops existing the moment the customer gets used to it.

CleanFlo treats that as a labelled record rather than as a camera roll. Every photograph attached to a job carries one of three labels, before, after or note, and the app guesses which: a photograph taken while the checklist is still being worked through is a before, one taken after the last item is ticked is an after, and the cleaner can correct either in the viewer. Up to twelve a visit.

The pairing is what makes it worth doing. The first before is paired with the first after, the second with the second, and the pair is drawn side by side both for the cleaner who took them and for the client, in the same lightbox, from their own login. Neither of them has to go hunting through a folder to make the comparison the whole job was about.

One honest limit, and it matters most to exactly this trade. A photograph is not tagged with the room it was taken in. The pairing is by order in the sequence, because there is no area field on a job photograph, so six rooms means shooting the six befores in the same order as the six afters. That is a habit rather than a feature, and it is worth knowing before you buy.

Priced by the item, and the shelf it comes from

A carpet round is not a round. It is a book of single visits, each one quoted before it is booked, and the price is built from things you can count: rooms, staircases, sofas, mattresses, a rug collected and brought back.

The services catalogue starts stocked. When you set the account up, the library offers a Carpet & Upholstery shelf and you tick what you actually sell, editing the price and the time first if you want to. Nothing reaches your account until you confirm it, and every figure below is the app’s own starting suggestion rather than a researched market rate or anything CleanFlo charges. They are a place to start arguing from, not a price list to adopt.

From there a quote is line items, in whatever combination the job actually is. You can hold a deposit against it as a percentage or a fixed sum, with the exact figures the deposit invoice will carry shown before you send it, set how many days the price stands for, and send it as a link the client accepts or declines themselves. A quote stays editable after it has been sent, because a quote is a negotiating position rather than a document a tax authority is counting.

If you would rather work the number out before you write it down, the cleaning quote calculator and the time estimator both run in the browser with nothing stored, and how to quote a cleaning job is the long version.

The machine, and who has it

The difference between this trade and a mop-and-cloth round is a machine that cost four figures, and it is usually in somebody else’s van.

Equipment is a register: name, category, serial number, purchase date, replacement cost, warranty expiry, a condition of excellent, good, fair or poor with a note against it, a photograph, and a status of available, loaned, out for maintenance or retired. Lend one to a cleaner and the loan is recorded against the machine with who has it and when it is expected back, so the answer to "where is the second extractor" is a screen rather than a group chat.

What it does not do is service intervals. Nothing here books the machine in, counts its hours or chases a service that is due; the warranty expiry is a date you can see coming and not a reminder that arrives on its own. Consumables are a different register again: chemicals, tools and PPE sit in stock with a level and a reorder point, per location.

COSHH, and the paperwork a client asks a carpet cleaner for

Extraction work is chemical work, and a letting agent or an office client asking for your paperwork is asking for three things: the risk assessment for the site, the method statement for how the work is done, and the safety data for what you are spraying on their floor.

All three are documents in CleanFlo rather than a folder in a van. The compliance vault files a document by kind and COSHH / Safety Data is one of the kinds, alongside insurance, certificates, policies, training records and permits, each with its own expiry date and a warning thirty days before it lapses. Risk assessments are scored on a 5×5 matrix, likelihood against severity, with the residual score after controls, and print to a clean A4 page. The method statement builder asks about COSHH awareness, working at height and manual handling by name.

What CleanFlo does not have is anything that knows about chemicals themselves. There is no dilution calculator inside the app, no product database, no fibre or stain chart and nothing that reads a safety data sheet and writes the assessment for you. It stores and dates the documents; the judgement stays yours. Our free chemical dilution calculator and the COSHH assessment template are on this site rather than in the product for exactly that reason.

Where the carpet work actually comes from

Most carpet and upholstery jobs are not searched for. They are noticed: by a cleaner standing in a house doing something else, by a letting agent between tenants, or by an office manager who has looked at the same traffic lane for two years.

CleanFlo takes the first of those seriously. A cleaner on any job can raise extra work from the phone by picking a type, and Carpets and Sofas and chairs are two of the six on the list, with an optional note in their own words. It becomes an enquiry with the source recorded as raised on site, carrying the client’s name, their email or phone number and the address of the site, and it lands in the same inbox as the leads from your website. If the client has no contact details on file the app refuses to start rather than queueing a lead nobody can reply to.

The inbox itself is built for the follow-up rather than the receipt: leads never answered, leads waiting more than two days, leads with no quote raised against them, and overdue follow-ups are each a filter. If most of your work comes through an agent or a domestic round, the domestic cleaning page and the end of tenancy page are the two pages written for those books, and the same account runs all three.

For the public half of it, your own page is part of the price, and the layout offered to a company that says most of its work is ovens, carpets and driveways opens on a before and after the visitor drags, then explains the method before it names a price. That is the shape of the argument this trade actually wins on. See the website page for what it is and what it is not.

What this does not do

There is no fibre or stain chart, no drying-time estimate and no chemical database. CleanFlo does not know what your carpet is made of, will not tell you which pre-spray to use, and does not calculate a dwell time. It holds the job, the quote, the photographs and the paperwork.

A photograph is not tagged with a room. Before and after pair by their position in the sequence, so the order you shoot them in is the order they pair in.

There is no route optimisation. CleanFlo will not order your day by drive time or work out the shortest loop between four jobs, which matters more in this trade than in a fixed round because the jobs are wherever they were booked.

Machines have no service schedule. The register holds a warranty expiry and a maintenance status you set yourself, and nothing chases either.

Hours in reports are estimated from the job as scheduled rather than taken from a verified timesheet. Start and complete are a real record of when a job began and finished, and they are not evidence in a payroll dispute.