How a job moves through its statuses

Status is the spine of the schedule. It sets the colour of the chip on the calendar, it drives the counts on the summary strip, it decides which jobs can be invoiced, and it is the thing your client is really asking about when they ring on a Wednesday.

The five states

The ordinary path is Scheduled to In Progress to Done, and nothing else is a normal route. Cancelled can be reached from anywhere and is the correct answer whenever the work is not going to happen, because deleting a job throws away the record of it ever having been booked.

Who moves it, and from where

In normal operation, the cleaner does. They open the job on their phone and press Start Job, which moves it to In Progress and stamps the time. When they are finished they press Complete Job, confirm on a sheet headed Complete this job?, and it goes to Done with a second time stamp.

That is the design, and it is why the drawer says so out loud: while a job is In Progress the Change Status heading in the office app has a note appended to it reading — cleaner controls start/complete. The person on site is the one who knows.

The hour before a job starts

Between booking and starting there are two small facts a job chip can carry, and they answer the question an owner actually opens the schedule to ask at ten to nine: is anyone going to turn up?

Changing a status yourself

Open any job on the Schedule and the drawer titled Job Details shows the job title, its current status as a pill, and a section headed Change Status. That section holds the three statuses the job is not currently in, each drawn in its own colour. Clicking one moves the job.

Moving a Scheduled job is instant: there is nothing to overwrite. Moving a job that a cleaner has already started or finished is not, because their record of it exists and you are about to contradict it. In both cases you get a red confirmation first.

The button is called Override anyway rather than "Confirm" on purpose. Marking a job Done from the office when the cleaner has not finished it is sometimes exactly right, and sometimes the reason a client is complaining a fortnight later.

The field report

Once a cleaner has started a job, the Job Details drawer grows a section headed Field Report. It is written entirely by the phone and cannot be edited from the office. This is the part you read out to a client.

• Started 08:41, in 24-hour time, taken at the moment they pressed Start Job. If the start was later than the booked time it carries an amber Late badge; if they started ahead of the booked day it carries an Early badge and the reason they gave for it.
• Completed 11:07, stamped the same way when they finish.
• Any completion notes they typed on the job, printed underneath as plain text.
• Lost Property (2) when anything was found, listing each item with Found: under the sofa beneath it.

Lost property is worth taking seriously. A cleaner who found something is telling you before the client notices it is missing, and the entry is timestamped to a job, a site and a person. It is the difference between an awkward phone call and a straightforward one.

Verification

Underneath the site details, a job that is In Progress or Done carries a section headed Verification. When the cleaner pressed Start and Complete, their phone recorded where it was, and CleanFlo compares that against the property's own coordinates.

Each stamp is one line: the word Started or Completed, a verdict, then the detail written as at 08:41 · 34 m from the property · ±18 m. The last figure is the accuracy the phone itself reported, which matters: a fix good to ±400 m cannot confirm or deny anything, and CleanFlo says so rather than guessing.

The radius is 250 metres by default, and it is deliberately generous. Phones fix indoors to ±50 to ±150 metres routinely, and a terraced street puts three other addresses within tens of metres. Wrongly doubting a cleaner costs far more than missing a rare genuine problem. Where a stamp has coordinates, a link reading See this point on a map opens them.

Two other lines can appear here. A job marked done later than it happened gets an amber callout headed Completed after the fact with the reason the cleaner picked, or Marked done later than it happened. No reason was recorded. if they were not asked for one. And a job from before location capture existed gets one quiet grey line instead of any of the above: Predates location tracking — this job was completed before CleanFlo recorded job locations.

Cancelling rather than deleting

Cancelled is a status. Deleted is not: it removes the job. The two get confused because both make the work stop, and only one of them is recoverable in any sense.

A cancelled job stays on the calendar in red, keeps its price, its services and its history, still counts on the summary strip and still shows up in reports. It can be moved back to Scheduled if the client changes their mind. A deleted job is gone, and the confirmation says so: Delete this job? This cannot be undone.