The fortnightly at Maple Court
still needs a cleaner.

A domestic round is a rhythm, not a diary

The work on a domestic book is not a series of bookings. It is a rhythm: Maple Court every other Tuesday at half eight, the flat on Chapel Street every Thursday, the big house on the hill once a month. Nobody books it again. It simply comes round, and the business works when it comes round without anybody rebuilding it.

So the thing to set up once is the repeat. A clean is entered weekly, fortnightly or monthly, for a number of visits or until a date you choose, and every one of those visits is written onto the rota the moment you save the first. The round exists in the software the way it exists in your head, which is as something that is already there rather than something waiting to be typed in.

What breaks a round is not the booking. It is the week somebody is off, the house that swaps its day, and the clean that quietly ends up with nobody on it. A clean with nobody assigned is the first thing on the dashboard, above everything else the business wants you to look at, because a Tuesday that passes with nobody on Maple Court is a customer who starts asking whether you are still coming.

The same cleaner, and the week you cannot send them

Households are not indifferent about who comes in. A regular client with a key safe and a dog would rather have the same person every fortnight, and a round that keeps that promise loses fewer customers than one that does not.

The rota keeps it without locking it. A clean carries whoever you put on it, and the recurring series carries them forward, so the default is the same person every time. The week that person is off, reassigning the clean checks three things before it lets you: the cleaner’s other work that day, their approved time off, and their availability for that weekday. If any of those cannot be read, the assignment is refused with a message saying so rather than cleared as though nothing were wrong.

That is a small thing on a two-cleaner book and the whole game on a nine-cleaner one. Sending somebody to a house on the day they booked off is not a scheduling error, it is a phone call from a client and an argument with a cleaner, and it is the failure mode that a wall planner cannot see coming.

The keys, the codes and the dog

Every domestic round accumulates a body of knowledge that lives nowhere: which key opens the side door, the alarm code and how long you have to key it in, that the dog is fine but the gate is not, that number 14 wants the recycling out on a Thursday.

It sits in a WhatsApp thread from March, and the cost of that is not the searching. It is the new cleaner who does not have it, the phone call at half eight because the code did not work, and the day nobody can start because the person who knew is on holiday.

All of it belongs against the property: the address, the access notes, the key and code records, and the checklist for that house. It arrives on the cleaner’s own phone with the clean, in whichever of twenty-seven languages their phone is set to, and it is stored on the device before they get there, so a basement flat with no signal is a normal Tuesday rather than a problem.

Getting paid without chasing it

Domestic work is a lot of small invoices, which is why it is the kind most often reconstructed from memory at the end of the month. Finished cleans wait in one list and one click turns a visit into an invoice with your BACS sort code, account number and a unique payment reference on it, and VAT on it only if you told us once that you are registered.

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 link of your own, a Stripe Payment Link, a PayPal.Me or a GoCardless page, pasting it in puts a Pay now button on the invoice and in the client portal, and the money goes to you directly. You record the payment here when it lands.

An invoice nobody has paid is chased by email at seven, fourteen and thirty days overdue, once per stage, and the chase stops the moment you mark it paid. That is the part of the month most domestic operators do not do, and it is the part that costs the most.