How a clean moves through its statuses
A clean starts as Scheduled and, if everything goes to plan, you never touch its status at all: the cleaner moves it from their phone and the record writes itself.
On this page
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 cleans can be invoiced, and it is the thing your client is really asking about when they ring on a Wednesday.
The five states
- Scheduled
- Sky blue. Booked and not started. Every clean begins here, whether it was created by you, by a repeat or from a client portal request.
- In Progress
- Amber. A cleaner has pressed Start clean on their phone and is on site. The chip pulses on the grid and the clean appears at the top of their list.
- Done
- Green. Finished. The clean now carries a field report, is eligible for an invoice, and gets a Clean report button in its drawer.
- Cancelled
- Red. Not happening. The clean stays on the calendar and keeps its history rather than disappearing, and the assigned cleaner is told.
- Unassigned
- Red, and not a status at all. It is what the app shows wherever a clean has no cleaner on it. Underneath, the clean is still Scheduled.
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 clean 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 clean on their phone and press Start clean, which moves it to In Progress and stamps the time. When they are finished they press Complete clean, confirm on a sheet headed Complete this clean?, 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 clean 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.
Time elapsed
1:24:04
Safety
Add to this clean
Tell the office
- Back returns to the day's cleans.
The hour before a clean starts
Between booking and starting there are two small facts a clean 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?
- confirmed
- Green tick. The cleaner has answered Can you make this one? on their phone with Yes, I'll be there.
- on the way
- Sky blue van. They have pressed On my way. This one wins, because somebody already driving there has plainly seen the clean.
Changing a status yourself
Open any clean on the Schedule and the drawer titled Clean details shows the clean's title, its current status as a pill, and a section headed Change Status. That section holds the three statuses the clean is not currently in, each drawn in its own colour. Clicking one moves the clean.
Moving a Scheduled clean is instant: there is nothing to overwrite. Moving a clean 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.
| Clean is currently | The confirmation says |
|---|---|
| In Progress | The cleaner is currently working on this clean. Changing it to "Done" will override their progress. |
| Done | This clean was completed by the cleaner. Changing it to "Scheduled" will override the field report. |
The button is called Override anyway rather than "Confirm" on purpose. Marking a clean 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 clean, the Clean 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 clean. 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 clean, printed underneath as plain text.
- Lost Property (2) when anything was found, listing each item with Found: under the sofa beneath it.
Second-floor kitchen tap still dripping, reported to the site manager on the way out.
Lost Property (2)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 clean, a site and a person. It is the difference between an awkward phone call and a straightforward one.
Verification
Underneath the site details, a clean 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.
| Verdict | What it means |
|---|---|
| At the property | The device was inside the radius. Green. |
| Away from the property | The device was outside it. Red, and the only verdict drawn as a problem. |
| Location too approximate | The fix was too rough for the comparison to mean anything. Grey. |
| Property has no coordinates | Your fault, not theirs. A link offers Add coordinates to this property. Grey. |
| Location permission declined | The cleaner did not allow location access on their device. Amber. |
| Location unavailable | The phone could not get a fix, which is normal indoors and in basements. Amber. |
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 clean 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 clean from before location capture existed gets one quiet grey line instead of any of the above: Predates location tracking: this clean was completed before CleanFlo recorded clean locations.
Cancelling rather than deleting
Cancelled is a status. Deleted is not: it removes the clean. The two get confused because both make the work stop, and only one of them is recoverable in any sense.
A cancelled clean 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 clean is gone, and the confirmation says so: Delete this clean? This cannot be undone.
Common questions
Can I mark a clean as Done before the cleaner has been?
A cleaner forgot to press Complete. What is the tidiest fix?
Why is a finished clean not showing a Verification section?
Does a clean have to be Done before I can invoice it?
What is the Clean report button in the footer?
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