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Chase nothing.

The month you reconstruct from memory

Ask a cleaning business owner what the worst part of the month is and it is rarely the cleaning. It is the last Sunday of it, going through a diary and a bank statement working out who was visited, what they were charged, who has already paid and what has been forgotten entirely.

Every one of those facts already exists by the time the month ends. The clean happened, somebody marked it complete, it had a price and a client on it. The reason the Sunday exists is that the record of the work and the record of the money are two different systems, usually a calendar and a spreadsheet, and nothing joins them.

So the useful thing invoicing software does for a cleaner is not the PDF. It is being on the other side of the finished clean: the work is already the invoice, and what is left is deciding when to send it.

Cleaning invoicing software, from the finished clean to the document

Completed cleans that have not been billed wait in one list. One click turns a clean, or a month of them, into an invoice with the right services and prices on it, your sort code, your account number and a unique payment reference. Sending is one more click, as a PDF by email or as a link the client opens in a browser.

VAT appears only if you told us once that you are registered. Leave it off and no VAT ever shows on an invoice, not a zero and not a line: the invoice is a document for a business that does not charge it. Register later, tick the box, and every invoice from that point carries it at twenty per cent, with your VAT number on the paper.

An issued invoice does not change afterwards. That is a deliberate rule rather than a limitation: deleting a sent invoice leaves a hole in a numbered sequence a tax authority expects to be unbroken, and leaves your client holding a document you have no record of. An invoice raised in error is voided instead, which keeps the number, stamps the paper, and records why in a line that still means something in a year.

The monthly run, for the clients who want one invoice

Commercial clients and letting agents do not want an invoice per visit. A client with four sites cleaned three times a week wants one document a month, itemised, on thirty-day terms.

The run does exactly that. Pick the period, see every client with completed unbilled work in it, review clean by clean what is going to be billed, raise the lot as drafts and issue and send them without leaving the screen. Each client is billed by its own call, so one client failing neither aborts the run nor undoes a client that has already gone out, and the screen reports honestly what happened to each.

No clean can be billed twice, and that guarantee is not on the screen. The database claims each client’s work under a row lock inside the same transaction that writes the invoice, so two people pressing the button at the same moment produce one invoice and a message saying the other run took the work.

Getting paid, and the chase you do not have to send

Payments are recorded against the invoice with the amount, the date and how they came in, and a part payment is a normal event rather than an error: cleaning clients routinely pay short or in two goes, so the outstanding balance is what everything downstream reads.

CleanFlo does not take the money. It holds no Direct Debit or standing order mandate for you and never sees a payment happen. If you have a payment page of your own, a Stripe Payment Link, a PayPal.Me or a GoCardless page, putting it on the account adds a Pay now button to the invoice, to the client portal and to the chasing email, and the money goes to you directly.

What is not paid is chased for you. A daily job walks the overdue ladder at thirty, fourteen and seven days, highest stage first, and sends the highest stage that invoice has reached and never had sent. One email per stage, no repeats, and it reads the balance rather than the total, so somebody who has paid half is chased for the half. The moment you record the payment the chase stops.

What this does not do

It does not process payments. There is no terminal, no Direct Debit mandate and no CleanFlo checkout: your own payment page is a link on the invoice, and the money never passes through us.

There is no live accounting connection. Nothing signs into Xero, QuickBooks or Sage on your behalf and no invoice is pushed into a ledger. What exists is an export in the shape each of them documents for imports, one row per line item and dates written the UK way, for whoever does your books to bring in and review.

There is no credit control beyond those three emails. Nothing escalates to a letter before action, nothing charges statutory interest, and nothing hands a debt to a collection agency.

And it is not accounting software. It bills for the cleaning and tracks what came in against it. It does not do your VAT return, your payroll filing or your year end, and the export exists precisely because somebody else does.