Run your rota.
Not the other way around.

What a cleaning rota actually has to survive

Most software calls this scheduling, which makes it sound like the hard part is putting work in a calendar. It is not. Putting the work in is ten minutes on a Sunday. The hard part is the fortnight afterwards, when somebody rings in sick, a client moves their day, a new contract starts on Wednesday and two of those changes have to reach a phone in somebody else’s pocket before eight tomorrow morning.

So the test of a cleaning rota is not how it looks on Sunday. It is whether Thursday is still true on Thursday, whether the person going knows, and whether anything with nobody on it is visible before the client notices.

Four views, and which one is for what

The calendar has four: agenda, day, week and month. That is not four ways of drawing the same thing. Week is the planning view, laid out as a seven-column grid with the hours down the side, and it is where the shape of the week is obvious. Day is for the morning something has gone wrong in. Month is for the question a contract asks, which is whether the sites are covered in three weeks. Agenda is a flat list of what is next.

On a phone the calendar opens on agenda rather than week, because a seven-column grid is a desktop object and a cleaning business owner opening the rota at half seven in a van is not planning anything. They want to know what is on today and who is on it. The view is read once when the page opens, so a deliberate switch to week on a tablet stays switched.

Anywhere the grid is drawn, a clean can be dragged to a different hour or a different day. That path and the keyboard-reachable Reschedule item go through exactly the same conflict check, so a mouse drag and a screen reader get the same answer, and a move that would double-book somebody is refused rather than saved with a warning on it.

The round, set once

Recurring work is entered once as weekly, fortnightly or monthly, ending after a number of visits or on a date you choose, and every occurrence is written onto the rota the moment you save. A fortnightly house booked in January exists in March, on the right Tuesday, whether or not you thought about it again.

A series can be edited forwards. Change the cleaner, the time, the length, the price, the title or the notes on one occurrence and you can apply it to every future scheduled occurrence in that series, with every one of them conflict-checked first: if any single future visit would clash, the whole batch is refused and nothing is written. A series can also be ended from a date forwards, which cancels the future occurrences and leaves everything already done exactly as it was.

What there is not is a bespoke interval. Weekly, fortnightly and monthly are the three, and a four-weekly or six-weekly round is either run as monthly or booked as dated visits. On a window round that is a real difference, which is why the window cleaning page says so in its own words.

Assigning somebody who can actually go

Assigning a clean reads three things before it lets you: that cleaner’s other work that day, their approved time off, and their availability for that weekday. All three have to answer. If any of them cannot be read, the assignment is blocked with a message saying so, rather than cleared as though nothing had been found.

Once the clean is assigned, the cleaner is told: a push notification to their phone and an email, and the same again if it is changed or cancelled. You can also send the next fortnight’s schedule by email to whichever cleaners you pick, which is the thing most owners currently do by screenshotting a spreadsheet. Anyone who would rather have it in their own calendar can subscribe to a private feed of their own rota instead, by a token that is theirs alone.

The clean itself carries the address, the access notes, the key and alarm codes held against the site and its checklist, on the cleaner’s own phone, in whichever of twenty-seven languages the phone is set to, stored before they arrive so a basement with no signal changes nothing.

The job with nobody on it

The dashboard opens on a list of decisions rather than a set of charts, and the first thing on it is any scheduled clean from today onwards with nobody assigned. It sits above the complaints, above the overdue invoices, above everything.

That ordering is deliberate. An unassigned clean is the most time-critical version of a decision nobody has made: if today passes with nobody on it, the client is simply not covered, and every other problem on the list can wait a day where this one cannot.

What this does not do

There is no route optimisation. CleanFlo does not order your day by drive time, work out the shortest loop round an estate, or re-sequence the round when one customer cancels. The day’s cleans are listed with their addresses and one tap opens an address in the phone’s own maps app, which is Google Maps rather than a routing engine of ours.

There is no bespoke recurrence interval. Weekly, fortnightly and monthly are the three that exist, and nothing repeats on the second Tuesday of the month or every ten days.

The hours that appear in reports are estimated from the clean as scheduled rather than taken from a verified timesheet. Cleaners start and complete work on their phone, so the record of when it began and finished is real, and it is a measure of workload rather than evidence in a billing dispute.

Nothing reads an external booking calendar. There is no channel manager, no iCal in, and no booking on Airbnb or Booking.com that creates a clean here. A changeover is a job type on the rota, set once or set recurring, and the feed that does exist points the other way: one private calendar out, per cleaner.