Creating a job

The Add Job drawer slides in from the right and is long enough to scroll. It has nine sections and only two of them are compulsory: you need at least one date and at least one service. Everything else can be filled in later by editing the job.

Three ways to open it

All three open the same drawer. The difference is how much of it is filled in when it arrives.

The drawer is titled Add Job with Schedule a new cleaning job underneath. Editing an existing job gives you the same form titled Edit Job and Update job details, minus the Repeat section and the ability to add extra dates.

Template, client and location

If you have saved any job templates, the first thing in the drawer is Load Template: a row of chips, one per template. Clicking one fills in the job type, the duration, the services, the add-ons, the checklist and the notes in a single action. It does not touch the client, the location or the date, because those are the parts that are different every time. Templates only appear on a new job, never when editing.

Next is Client & Location. Both are ordinary dropdowns with an empty first option: — No client — and — No location —. Picking a client filters the location list down to that client's sites; picking a location before a client leaves every site in the list. When a location is selected, its address appears underneath it, and its access notes appear under that.

When it happens

The When section is a repeatable pair: a date and a start time, side by side. Below them, Add Another Date adds a second row, a third, as many as you need, each with its own X to take it away again. Every row you fill in becomes its own job when you save.

Use extra dates for work that is irregular: a holiday let being turned round on the three Saturdays somebody has booked, or a builder's clean spread over a Tuesday and a Thursday. For anything on a fixed rhythm, use Repeat in the section below instead. Extra dates only exist on a new job: editing an existing one gives you a single row, because an edit changes that job and not the eleven others it was created alongside.

Underneath sits Duration (mins), in minutes, stepping in fifteens with a floor of fifteen. It defaults to 60. Duration is what makes the chip on the calendar the right height, and it is what the availability check measures overlaps against, so a two-hour job entered as sixty minutes will happily let you double-book the second hour.

After When comes Repeat, which is only offered on a new job. It has its own guide: see Repeating a job.

Services, add-ons and what it is worth

Services and Add-ons are the same control twice over. Each row is a dropdown with — Select — at the top and then every item in your catalogue written as {name} · £{price}, a quantity box labelled Qty, and an X to remove the row. Under the rows, Add Service on the first, Add Add-on on the second.

The split between the two is not cosmetic. Services are the work: a standard home clean, an office nightly. Add-ons are the extras billed on top: an oven, interior windows, a carpet shampoo. They price identically but they are tagged differently, and the tag follows the job all the way onto the invoice.

With nothing in your catalogue yet, the section prints a hint instead of a picker: No services set up yet. Add them in Products & Services. and, on the add-on section, No add-ons set up yet. Add them in Products & Services. Trying to save with neither filled in puts a red line under the Services section reading Pick at least one service or add-on.

Estimated Earnings then adds it all up as you type. One row per service and per add-on, with a quantity multiplier when there is more than one and a small add-on tag on the extras. Below them, Additional charge marked inc. VAT, a plain pounds-and-pence box for anything the catalogue does not cover: a congestion charge, a skip, a one-off materials cost. Then the Total, also marked inc. VAT.

The checklist and the cleaner

Checklist is a list of plain text rows, each one placeholdered Step 1, Step 2 and so on, with Add Checklist Item underneath. These are the tasks the cleaner ticks off on their phone while they are on site, and they are what the count on the job report is measured against. Keep them concrete: "Washrooms restocked" beats "Bathrooms".

A job with no checklist is perfectly valid. The cleaner app tells them so: No checklist for this job, and they work through it as normal. But an empty checklist is also an empty job report, and a client asking what was actually done gets a shorter answer.

Staff holds one control, labelled Assigned Staff, and it starts on — Choose a cleaner later —. Every cleaner in the list carries a live availability badge worked out from the date, time and duration you have just entered. Leaving it empty is allowed and puts a warning under the field: No cleaner assigned — you'll need to assign one before this job starts. The whole of that is covered in Assigning a cleaner.

Notes, and saving

Notes are hidden until you ask for them. At the foot of the drawer there is a full-width Add Job Notes button; press it and it becomes a labelled Job Notes textarea placeholdered Special instructions, access details, reminders… with a Remove link beside the label. Remove clears the text as well as hiding the box, so do not use it to tidy the form up.

Job notes go to the cleaner. They appear on the job in the phone app under Job notes, so they are the right place for "park on the road, not the drive" and the wrong place for anything about the client's billing.

The footer holds two buttons: Cancel and the primary save. The save button renames itself to match what it is about to do.

Two things stop a save. Miss the date and a red line appears at the top of the form reading At least one date is required; miss the services and it reads At least one service is required, with Pick at least one service or add-on. under the Services section itself. The form scrolls the message into view rather than leaving you looking at a button that appears to have done nothing.

A successful save closes the drawer and raises a toast: Job created for one, 12 recurring jobs created for a series, Job updated for an edit. If a cleaner was assigned, a second toast follows once the email is away: Job notification sent to Aisha Nowak.