Start clean, at the door.
The timesheet fills itself in.
CleanFlo is the cleaner clock in app built into a UK cleaning business's own software: a tap at the door, a tap on the way out, and a coarse location fix at each end.
Built in Cornwall. No signup needed to look: the demo is a real CleanFlo company, open to anyone.
The cleaner clock in app is one button
Nobody clocks on for a day and nobody clocks off at the end of one. The clean is the shift, so the record of the week is made of the cleans that made it up.
- 01
Start clean, at the door
The job turns to in progress on the phone before the write has left it, so a cleaner on a basement signal never waits on a round trip. The office sees the start, and a late one arrives as a late one.
- 02
The fix follows, on its own
Asking a phone where it is takes up to twelve seconds indoors, so the location is a second write rather than a passenger on the first. A cleaner who starts a job and pockets their phone has still started the job.
- 03
Complete clean, and the entry closes
The checklist, the photographs and the second fix go with it. A break taken in the middle is an entry in the same ledger, prompted once after six hours because that is where the Working Time Regulations put a rest break.
One fix at the start. One at the finish. Nothing in between.
Each one is compared against the property's own coordinates and given a verdict in a sentence. The radius is 250 metres and it is generous on purpose: a phone indoors fixes to within 50 to 150 metres on an ordinary day, four front doors on a terrace sit inside a hundred, and an owner wrongly doubting a cleaner costs far more than a start nobody queried. The fix's own margin of error is added to the radius before anything is judged.
- At the property The fix landed inside the radius. Nothing is flagged and nothing is said.
- Away from the property Outside it, with the distance printed beside the job. The one state an owner is asked to look at.
- Location too approximate A fix wider than 500 metres cannot confirm or deny an address, so it says so rather than pretending.
- Location permission declined The cleaner said no on their own phone. Recorded as their answer, not as a fault.
- Location unavailable Permission was fine and the fix never arrived. Basements and plant rooms, most days.
- Property has no coordinates Nothing to measure against yet. Shown as our gap, with the fix offered on the job.
- Predates location tracking A clean finished before any of this existed. Grey text, never a badge.
Only one of the seven is ever coloured as a problem, and only from the start: a finish recorded from the car park after a start at the door is not a second offence.
From the tap at the door to the pay run
The two taps write both ends of an entry in a time ledger. Everything below reads that ledger, which is why the hours are not typed up again on a Sunday evening from four WhatsApp threads.
The entry opens on the tap, not on the sync
The time written to the ledger is the one the phone read when the button was pressed. A start at nine in a basement that reaches us at five still says nine, because the timestamp travels with the queued write rather than being taken from the server when it lands.
Closed when the clean is
Complete clean closes the entry the start opened, alongside the checklist and the photographs. Undo a mis-tapped start and the entry is closed at the instant it opened rather than deleted: a zero-minute row worth nothing in the totals and impossible to mistake for work.
A timesheet that never shows one number
Money then Timesheets, opening on the fortnight ending today. Four readings: what would actually be paid, unpaid breaks, what is still waiting on a decision, and how many people recorded anything. A total with four unresolved entries behind it is not the same fact as a clean one.
Amended in the open
Change a figure and what the phone observed stays printed beside it, so the row reads 07:58 (clocked 08:14). That divergence is the audit trail rather than an untidiness to hide, and it is what makes an approved period defensible three months later.
The pay run, and the export after it
Approve a period and it locks what it paid for. CleanFlo produces the timesheet and never the payslip: no PAYE, no National Insurance, no pension, no figure called net pay. Those belong to the payroll system that holds the tax codes.
Mileage and receipts on the same week
A journey in a cleaner's own car, at the HMRC approved rate the database resolves at approval rather than the estimate on screen, and a receipt photographed against a job or a vehicle. Nothing is owed until you approve it.
What this is not
Six things worth knowing before you put it in front of a team, rather than after.
- Nothing is tracked between jobs. Two points a clean, nothing in between, nothing after work and nothing on a day off. The cleaner is told exactly that, on their own phone, in their own language, before the first clean can be started.
- It is not a geofence. A cleaner standing outside the radius can still press Start clean. The distance is recorded and the job is flagged for you to look at; the button is never locked.
- A refused permission never blocks a start. The clean records that no location was available and the day carries on, which is also what happens in a basement with no signal at all.
- It is not a shift clock bolted on beside the work. There is no clocking on for a day and no clocking on at a site with no job on it: the clean is the shift, and a break is an entry in the same ledger.
- The hours in Reports are still estimated from the job as scheduled. That figure is a measure of workload rather than evidence in a billing dispute, and the ledger the timesheet is built from is the record to read instead.
- The 250 metre radius is held per company but there is no screen to change it in yet, so in practice every company is on the default.
Frequently asked questions
01 Do cleaners clock in separately from starting a job?
02 What happens if there is no signal at the property?
03 What if a cleaner will not share their location?
04 Why 250 metres, and can somebody start from the car park?
05 Can a cleaner change their own hours afterwards?
06 Is this included, or is it a separate plan?
Read next
- The cleaner app itself What your team sees: their day, the checklist, the photographs, offline, in 27 languages.
- Timesheets, screen by screen The four readings, amending an entry with the reason kept, and exporting a period.
- Mileage claims A journey claimed in a cleaner's own car, and the HMRC band that decides what it is worth.
- What an hour of cleaning actually costs you Wage, holiday, National Insurance and the unbilled hours, before you price the next contract.
- Cleaner onboarding checklist Printable. The day-one list this page's first-run notice belongs on.
- Employed or self-employed? The actual test, and why a rota and a clock are part of the answer.
- What it costs One price, every module, unlimited staff, clients and locations.
- Everything CleanFlo does The whole catalogue, module by module, this one included.
Put next Tuesday through it
Add one cleaner, put one job on the board, and press Start clean on your own phone at the door. 14 days, every module, no card to start.
£19.99 a month, flat · Unlimited staff, clients and locations