How to find your way around CleanFlo
Every screen in CleanFlo sits inside the same frame: a dark rail down the left, a thin strip along the top, and your work in the middle. Learn the frame once and every other guide gets shorter.
On this page
There are only four pieces of navigation in the whole product, and none of them move. A sidebar holding every destination. A top bar holding search, theme, notifications and help. A command palette on ⌘K that goes anywhere without the sidebar. And, on a phone, a bottom bar that replaces the rail rather than shrinking it.
Manage relationships and service sites
| Client | Contact | Sites | Status | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| RH Riverside Homes jane@example.com | Jane Lawson | 3 sites | Active | |
| SM St Marks Medical Centre admin@example.co.uk | Dr Aled Pryce | 1 site | Active | |
| HL Harbour Lettings lettings@example.co.uk | Owen Trelease | 9 sites | Active |
- Clients in the sidebar opens this screen.
- Add Client is the main action on this screen.
- New, in the title bar on every screen, adds a clean, client, quote, invoice and more.
The sidebar, in five groups
The sidebar is on screen on anything wider than a tablet. Each destination has its own icon, and they sit in five groups that run from what is happening now, through the work and the money, to compliance and your own account. Modules you switch off disappear from it.
| Group | What is in it |
|---|---|
| Today | Dashboard · Schedule · Messages |
| Run the work | Clients · Staff · Locations map · Services · Inventory · Equipment · Vehicles |
| Money | Web page · Enquiries · Site surveys · Quotes · Invoicing · Reports · Timesheets · Expenses |
| Compliance | Health & safety · Waste notes |
| Account | Settings · Modules · Branding · Support |
Add anything with New
The title bar along the top of every screen ends in a teal New button. It opens quick add: type or pick what you want to create and it takes you straight to the right form.
It also offers an inventory item, equipment, a vehicle and a service. On a phone the button shows just the plus sign.
Messages is the only row that ever changes. When somebody has written to you it grows a count on the right, and that count stops at "99+" rather than growing into the label. Below the nav sit two quiet links, Privacy and Terms, and below those the account row: your initials in a circle, your name, your company name underneath. Clicking it opens one item, Log out. There is no settings shortcut hidden in there and no account switcher.
The strip along the top
Sixty-four pixels of translucent chrome, identical on every screen. Reading left to right: the search trigger, the page title, then three buttons in the corner.
- Search everything…
- A magnifier, the words, and a small keyboard badge reading ⌘K. Clicking it opens the command palette. It is a button rather than an input, so there is nothing to type into here.
- Page title
- The name of the screen you are on: Dashboard, Schedule, Clients. On a detail page a back control appears to the left of it, which is how you get out of a client or a clean on a phone.
- Theme toggle
- A moon in light mode and a sun in dark. Hover it and the tooltip reads Theme: Light or Theme: Dark, naming the setting rather than the button. It flips straight between the two, and your choice is remembered on that device.
- Notification bell
- A teal dot appears on it when something is unread. Clicking opens the dropdown described below.
- Help
- A question mark. It opens the guide written for the screen you are standing on, at cleanflo.io/help, in a new browser tab, never navigating you away from what you were doing.
The theme toggle has no "system" setting, which is on purpose. CleanFlo stays light unless you have explicitly asked for dark, so a laptop that flips to dark at sunset does not flip the app underneath you mid-invoice.
The help button is worth a try at least once. On Schedule it opens "Creating a clean". On Clients it opens "Adding a client". On Settings it opens "Your company details". It matches on the section rather than the exact page, so it still works from inside a client record. When there is no guide for a screen it opens the Help Centre's own front page instead of doing nothing.
The ⌘K palette
Press ⌘K anywhere, or Ctrl+K on Windows, and a search box drops over the middle of the screen. Its placeholder is "Search clients, staff, cleans, inventory, services…", and that undersells it: it also searches incidents, audits, risk assessments and the help articles built into the app.
It searches your whole workspace at once, not the screen you are on. Results arrive grouped, always in the same order, with up to five rows per group and a count beside each heading.
The full set of groups, in the order they appear: Clients, Locations, Staff, Inventory, Cleans, Services, Incidents, Audits, Risk Assessments and Help guides. Each has its own colour, kept the same everywhere: clients are sky blue, locations amber, staff green, cleans teal.
Help guides is the group people find by accident and then keep using. The guides themselves live at cleanflo.io/help, but the index CleanFlo searches is bundled into the app, so it answers instantly and works whether or not the rest of the query finds anything.
The box has three things to say before it has any results for you.
- Before you type
- A command glyph and the line "Type to search across your entire workspace".
- While it looks
- A spinner and the word "Searching…". Typing is debounced by a quarter of a second, so this only shows up if you have stopped.
- When there is nothing
- A magnifier and
No results for "{query}", quoting back exactly what you typed.
Once there are results, a footer appears along the bottom reading "↑ ↓ navigate · ↵ open · esc close", which is the whole keyboard contract. Arrow keys move the highlight, Enter opens the highlighted row and closes the palette, Escape closes it without going anywhere. There is also an esc badge inside the input itself, and an X to clear the query without closing.
The bell
The bell collects three different kinds of thing and keeps them apart with tabs: All, Emails, Notifications and Activity. Emails are messages CleanFlo has sent on your behalf. Notifications are push alerts. Activity is the log of who did what in your account.
Each row is a coloured icon, a line of text and a time-ago stamp. The stamps go "Just now", then minutes, then hours, then days, and once something is more than a week old it switches to a plain date like "12 Aug". Colour follows the subject rather than the urgency: cleans are green, invoices amber, clients teal, inventory sky, staff blue, health and safety red.
A Mark all as read link sits in the header, and it only appears when there is something unread, so an empty header means you are up to date. If nothing has happened yet the panel shows a bell and the words "No activity yet".
One extra card can appear at the top of the panel, once. If your browser supports push alerts and you have not been asked yet, CleanFlo offers them here rather than firing a browser prompt at you unannounced: "Get clean alerts", "Know when a clean is assigned or finished, even with CleanFlo closed", and a Turn on button. If you have already blocked notifications at the browser level it says so instead, and tells you it is your browser settings that need changing rather than anything in the app.
On a phone
Below 768 pixels the sidebar is not narrowed, it is switched off. What replaces it is a bar along the bottom of the screen with four items, sitting where your thumb already is.
Dashboard, Schedule, Clients and Messages are the four an owner opens standing in a car park between cleans. More opens a full-screen dark menu carrying the whole rail: a Search everything button at the top, then the same five groups in the same order with the same labels, then your account row and Log out at the foot.
It is a full screen rather than a panel sliding in from the side, because on a phone the navigation is the screen while it is open. Tapping any row closes it and takes you there. So does the browser back gesture.
The offline banner
A thin bar appears at the edge of the screen when the connection is doing something worth telling you about. There are exactly four states, and each one says a different thing.
- Failed
- Red, and it outranks everything else because it is the only one that costs you work. Something was rejected when it reached the server and you will have to enter it again. It carries a dismiss X and waits for you to press it.
- Syncing
- A spinning arrow and a count of what is going up. Nothing is required of you.
- Synced
- "All changes saved", shown for three seconds after the queue empties, then gone.
- Offline
- The word on its own when there is nothing waiting, or with a count of queued changes when there is. You can carry on working: the writes queue on the device and go up when the signal comes back.
The banner never shows on the cleaner app. That half of the product has its own offline handling, drawn into the clean screens themselves rather than bolted along the top of them.
Common questions
Is there a keyboard shortcut for anything other than search?
Why does the theme not follow my computer?
Can my cleaners see the sidebar?
The bell has a dot but the list looks the same as yesterday. Why?
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