Choosing Software For A Cleaning Business

When a spreadsheet is still the right answer

For a solo cleaner with fifteen regular clients, a spreadsheet and a phone calendar genuinely work, cost nothing, and never go down. Anybody telling you otherwise is selling something.

The point at which it stops working is reasonably well defined, and it is not about client numbers. It is about the number of people who need to know the same thing. One person holding the schedule in their head is a working system. Three cleaners, a WhatsApp group, a paper rota and a spreadsheet is four versions of the truth, and the cost is not admin time, it is the missed job that nobody knew was unassigned.

The honest triggers for buying software: you have staff who need to be told where to go, you are invoicing enough that reconstructing what was done takes an evening, or somebody has started asking you for compliance paperwork. Before any of those, save your money.

The four categories, and what each is actually for

None of these is the right answer in general, and the category matters less than the fit. A business running cleaning alongside gardening and handyman work is genuinely better served by a broad field-service platform than by anything cleaning-specific, and we would rather say that than have you unhappy with us. Our comparison pages set out where each named product is the better choice.

The shortlist, product by product

Every product a UK cleaning business is realistically choosing between, and the spreadsheet it is choosing against. Every statement below was read off that company’s own site on 6 September 2026 and nothing here is a price, a rating or a customer count: prices change, and a rating is a number somebody else measured. Each entry ends with the sentence that matters most, which is when to buy that one instead of this one.

They are grouped by what each was built for rather than ranked, because a rank would be ours and the fit is yours. The comparison table puts the same list on one screen, with the same questions asked of each and the full set of places we are the wrong answer under it.

Built for cleaning, and built for the UK

The shortest list, and the one most UK cleaning companies should start from. A product built for one trade in one country does not need a tax setting, a currency setting or a form you design yourself before it produces an invoice a UK client recognises.

• CleanFlo. Ours, so weigh it accordingly. Cleaning is the only trade and the UK is the only country: VAT at 20% or off entirely if you are not registered, BACS with a unique payment reference on every invoice, risk assessments scored on a 5×5 with a residual score feeding a compliance position, waste transfer notes with the carrier checked against the regulator, and a cleaner app that works offline in 27 languages. One flat price for the company with no cap on staff, clients, locations or jobs. Buy this instead if you have staff to tell where to go and any commercial work at all, and you would rather the software bill did not move when you hire.
• ProCleanerUK. A UK product for UK cleaning companies, priced in bands by team size with the same features on every band. Their site refused our request on 6 September 2026, from a browser as well as from the command line, so unlike every other entry here this one describes only what their public listing states rather than what we read on their page. Buy this instead if you want one price per headcount band and you have opened their pricing page yourself, which we could not.
• Cleenie. UK-built for solo cleaners and small teams, in the browser, with the calendar, the customer list, keys and lockbox codes against each customer, PDF quotes and VAT invoicing. Priced in bands split twice: solo or team, and with invoicing or without. Their entry band is the cheapest product named in this guide. They publish no health and safety module and no offline working. Buy this instead if you clean on your own and invoice somewhere else. It will cost you less than we do and the key codes are the part you will use every day.
• Squeegee. UK-built and aimed at the round rather than the rota: jobs grouped into rounds, planned on a map, with optimised route navigation. It can hold a Direct Debit mandate for your customer through GoCardless and charge them when the work is done, or keep a card on file with Stripe, and it does bank reconciliation, a balance sheet and VAT returns to HMRC. Priced per user a month plus VAT across four plans. Their plan features list custom forms rather than a RAMS or COSHH module. Buy this instead if you run a window round or a domestic round and want the collection to happen without you. We hold no mandate, group no rounds and optimise no routes.
• GetCleanFlow. The near-name, one letter from ours, sold to solo cleaners, teams and companies internationally from a UK domain. Scheduling, invoicing, quotes, client records, job timers, checklists, photo uploads and team management. Two rates are published: a founder rate capped at a fixed number of sign-ups and locked for life to whoever claims one, and a standard rate behind it, both with a charge for each extra team member. No health and safety, offline working or multi-language app is published. Buy this instead if you are on your own and can still claim the founder rate.

Built for cleaning, built somewhere else

Cleaning-specific products from other markets. The workflows are often excellent and the assumptions underneath them are somebody else’s: sales tax rather than VAT, card rails rather than BACS, and health and safety practice written for a different inspector.

• ZenMaid. Built for US residential maid services and mature at it: recurring domestic schedules, dispatch, customer communication, booking forms. Tiered, with the entry plan capping how many appointments you can book in a month and the plans above it lifting that cap. US sales tax and US payment rails throughout. Buy this instead if you run a residential maid service in the United States, or a purely domestic UK round where the invoice format genuinely does not matter to your clients.
• Swept. Canadian, built for janitorial and commercial cleaning teams, and strong exactly where a big contract cleaner hurts: inspections, quality scoring, supply usage and job costing, with cleaner checklists translated. It has no client records, no quoting and no invoicing at all, and it is priced on how many locations you clean, in USD, from a minimum number of them. Buy this instead if you are a North American janitorial contractor with many sites and an accounts system you are happy with.
• CleanManager. Danish, built for cleaning companies, with a base module covering scheduling, cleaning plans, keys and codes and a client portal, then add-on modules for the time-tracking app, audits, invoice calculation, wage calculation and quote calculation. Priced per user a month by user type in Danish kroner, so an administrator, a supervisor, a cleaner with a login and a client with a login each cost a different amount. Buy this instead if you are a Scandinavian cleaning contractor, or a UK one content to price in kroner and to buy invoicing as a module.

Built for trades, and cleaning is one of them

Field service platforms. These are usually the most mature products on any shortlist, and the cost of that maturity is breadth: cleaning arrives as a configuration project rather than an assumption, and the cleaning-specific paperwork is a form you design.

The honest case for one of these is a business that is not only cleaning. If half your week is jet washing, gutters or handyman work, a single-trade product is a liability and one of these is the right answer.

• BigChange. UK-built, multi-trade, and centred on the vehicle: live tracking, geofencing, fleet management, with live sync to Xero, Sage, QuickBooks and SAP. Their cleaning page names RAMS and COSHH to cleaning companies and says a cleaning job cannot be started until its risk assessment has been completed, which is a harder line than ours. No rate is published and there is no free trial: the route in is a demo and a quote. Buy this instead if you run a real fleet across several trades, or your contract demands a hard block on starting a job.
• Joblogic. UK-built for field service and maintenance contractors, including facilities management: planned maintenance contracts, asset management, engineer tracking, audits, a customer portal and a marketplace of modules. Priced per user a month on the entry plan, with the two plans above it quoted rather than published. Their RAMS module is one of the marketplace add-ons rather than part of the base plan. Buy this instead if you are an FM or maintenance contractor running PPM contracts across sites and assets rather than cleaning rounds.
• ServiceM8. Australian, for trades and service businesses, with UK pricing published in GBP. It has a free plan that is a product rather than a trial: one user, with a cap on how many jobs you can create in a month. The paid bands are priced on that same job count and carry unlimited users, and it syncs live with Xero, QuickBooks Online and MYOB. Their full-featured app is optimised for iPhone and iPad, with a lighter companion app for Android. Buy this instead if you are on your own under their job cap, or a live Xero sync is the thing you want most.
• Jobber. The most-used product on most of these lists, built for home service trades generally, with mature quoting, scheduling and payments and a large third-party directory. Its tiers each include a number of users and charge a monthly rate for every extra one. In the UK its payments are cards plus Apple Pay and Google Pay, with no bank rail named on their own UK help page. Buy this instead if you run several trades and want the most mature product with the biggest integration list.
• Commusoft. UK-built for plumbing, heating, gas, electrical and renewables, with three tiers of per-user licences in contracted, rolling and daily forms so seasonal and subcontract labour can be paid for by the day. Cleaning is not among the trades they name. Buy this instead if you are a heating or electrical contractor with commercial contracts and a fluctuating engineer count.
• Tradify. From New Zealand, for trade contractors: electrical, plumbing, gas, HVAC and property maintenance. Priced per user a month across three plans plus a custom one, in USD, with Xero and QuickBooks Online sync. Cleaning is not among the trades they list. Buy this instead if your work is one of the trades it names, in which case it is a well-made product and this guide is not about you.

Built for the workforce, not for the business

The category that causes the most confusion on a shortlist. These are excellent at hours, shifts and reaching everybody, and they are not a system for running a cleaning company: no clients, no quotes, no invoices. A business that buys one usually runs it alongside accounting software and a spreadsheet of clients, which works, and means the schedule and the invoice never know about each other.

• Connecteam. Deskless workforce software across many industries: time clock, job scheduling, forms, chat, training and HR, sold as separate hubs. Their small-team plan is free for life under a headcount, which makes it the best free product on this list, and above that line each hub is a flat band covering a first block of users plus a rate for every extra one. Buy this instead if your hard problem is hours, shifts and reaching forty people, and your invoicing already lives somewhere you are happy with.
• Deputy. Australian, for shift-based workforces across many industries, with UK pricing published in GBP: rotas, timesheets, time clocking, labour law compliance, leave accruals and payroll integrations, priced per user per month across three plans. It holds no clients, quotes nothing and raises no invoice. Buy this instead if the whole problem is the rota, the timesheet and the wage bill, and somebody else already handles the money.
• A spreadsheet and a WhatsApp group. Free, familiar, never down, and what nearly everybody reading this is actually using. It stops working at the point where more than one person needs to know the same thing, and the cost is not admin time, it is the missed visit nobody knew about until the client rang. Buy this instead if you are one person with about fifteen regular clients. Genuinely.

How this shortlist was checked, and what is missing from it

Every entry above was read off that company’s own site on 6 September 2026, from their pricing page wherever they publish one, and each links back to it so you can check whether anything has moved. No figure is quoted on purpose: prices change without notice, there are a lot of them here, and a stale number would be worse than none.

Two absences are deliberate. No rating and no review count, because those are numbers somebody else measured. And no rank order, because a ranking would be our opinion of your business dressed up as a fact about the software. One entry is weaker than the rest and says so: ProCleanerUK’s site refused our request that day, so theirs describes only what their public listing states.

Where CleanFlo is the wrong answer

We sell one of the products above, so this is the section that decides whether the rest of the guide is worth anything. Each line names the product to buy instead.

• You want a Direct Debit mandate held for you, and the round planned on a map with an optimised route. Squeegee does both. CleanFlo holds no mandate, groups no rounds and optimises no routes.
• You want a live two-way sync with Xero or Sage. ServiceM8, Joblogic and Tradify sync. CleanFlo exports invoices, payments and revenue as CSV for a bookkeeper and has no live sync to anything.
• The work is not cleaning. Jobber, ServiceM8, Tradify, Commusoft and Joblogic serve trades generally, and a product built for one trade is a liability if half your week is jet washing or gutters.

If none of those describes your business, the argument for this one is on the pricing page and set against each named product on the comparison table. Put a real, awkward week into two of them during the free trials and buy the one that asked you to type the client name once.

What to actually test during a trial

Most software trials are spent looking at dashboards. The things that decide whether a tool survives contact with a Tuesday are rarely on the marketing site, and all of these can be tested in an afternoon.

• Put one real week in. Not a demo company: your actual rota, with the awkward client and the split shift. Software that handles the tidy case and not the messy one fails in week three.
• Move a job because somebody rang in sick. How many taps, and does the cleaner get told automatically? This is the most frequent operation in a cleaning business and it is often the worst-designed screen in the product.
• Hand a phone to your least technical cleaner. Say nothing and watch. If they need training to see today's jobs, adoption will fail and you will end up running the software and the WhatsApp group.
• Turn the phone to aeroplane mode and try to complete a job. Cleaning happens in basements and plant rooms. A web app with no signal is a blank screen and the cleaner rings you instead.
• Raise an invoice from a completed job and check it carries everything a UK VAT invoice legally needs, plus bank details and a payment reference.
• Export everything to CSV. Do this on day one, not on the day you leave. If you cannot get your data out easily, do not put a year of job history in.
• Import your existing clients. If the only route in is typing 120 clients by hand, the switching cost is an evening you will never spend and the trial will lapse.

Pricing models matter more than prices

Most cleaning software is priced per user, which is standard for the industry and a poor fit for this trade specifically. A cleaning business grows by adding cleaners, each of whom needs a login for a few minutes a day, so the metered cost lands on the cheapest users and lands exactly when you are trying to grow.

The practical consequence is that hiring becomes a purchasing decision. Taking a contract that needs four more cleaners should be a margin question, not a licensing one.

That does not make per-seat wrong. Below roughly three users a low base fee with no extra seats is usually the cheaper buy, and if you are solo with no plans to hire you should take it. Above that the models cross over. Rather than assert where, the cost calculator runs it against the rate you have actually been quoted. We do not publish competitors' prices, because they change and a stale figure on our site would be worse than none.

The cleaning-specific things a generic tool will not have

• Recurring jobs across multiple sites that rebuild themselves, rather than calendar events somebody copies forward.
• A per-site specification, so the checklist for the medical centre differs from the one for the office, and the cleaner sees the right one.
• RAMS, COSHH and incident logging held against the site they belong to. This is the one that decides commercial tenders, and almost nothing outside cleaning-specific software has it.
• Access notes, alarm codes and key holding as structured data on the property rather than a comment in a chat.
• UK VAT and BACS invoicing as the default rather than a tax configuration.
• An offline, multilingual cleaner app, reflecting where cleaning is done and who does it.
• Waste transfer notes, if you remove controlled waste yourself.

How much of this matters depends almost entirely on whether you do commercial work. For a purely domestic round, most of it is weight. For anybody bidding for offices, the compliance half is the difference between winning contracts and not being allowed to tender.

Questions worth asking any vendor

• Can I export everything, and how? A vendor who is vague about this is telling you something.
• What happens to my data if I cancel? Deleted, or retained and accessible for a period?
• Is there a contract or minimum term?
• Where is the data hosted, and are you GDPR compliant? Ask for the sub-processor list.
• Do cleaners count as billable users?
• What does support actually mean: a person, a chatbot, or a forum? And in which time zone?
• How often does it change? A product that has not shipped anything in a year is a product being wound down.