Setting up in an afternoon

A working CleanFlo is five things. Your company details, a client with somewhere to clean, a price list, cleaners who can log in, and a job on the calendar. None of them takes long on its own. What turns an afternoon into a fortnight is doing them out of order, because the Add Job drawer asks you to pick a client, a location, a service and a cleaner, and it cannot invent any of them for you.

Half an afternoon is realistic for a company with a handful of clients and five or six cleaners. What follows is that afternoon, in the order that works.

The wizard that runs before the app

The first time you sign in as the owner, CleanFlo does not open on the dashboard. It runs a six-step setup wizard in place of the app: welcome, services, clients, locations, staff, then the trial. The counter reads Step 1 of 6 and counts up, and the panel down the left side ticks off what you have added as you go, so the wizard shows you your own business filling in rather than a progress bar.

Nothing the wizard does is special. It writes exactly the same records you would write from the sidebar, in the same tables, and every step has a Skip. A Skip setup control sits above the whole thing and jumps to the last step, warning you first that your services, clients, locations and team will be left empty. One quirk worth knowing: the locations step is skipped for you when you did not add a client, because a location has to belong to one, so the counter can jump from Step 3 of 6 straight to Step 5 of 6.

The last step is the one that matters. It shows what you set up, then hands you to Stripe to start the 14-day trial. You can press I'll do this later, and the app tells you plainly what happens if you do: CleanFlo needs an active trial or subscription to open, so you will be asked again on the way in.

Do it in this order

Your company details

Settings has four tabs and no more: Company, My Account, Billing and Data Export. Company is the one that leaks out into everything your clients see. Its heading says as much: "Your business information shown on invoices and client communications."

The fields are a short list. Company name is the only required one. Company number and Contact phone are marked optional. Business address is one free-text line rather than split address, city and postcode boxes, so type it the way you want it printed. Number of cleaners is a plain count. Currency sets the symbol used on every invoice, quote and report, and defaults to the pound.

Two things people go looking for on this tab and do not find. Your bank details and your invoice branding are not here: they live under Invoicing → Settings, with the invoice numbering and payment terms. And there is no logo upload on the Company tab at all.

Your first client and their sites

Open Clients and press Add Client. The sheet that slides in is called Add New Client and it is longer than you expect, because it also sets up what that client can see of themselves.

Only the client name is required. Everything under Primary Contact is who you ring when a key does not work. Tags are the useful bit and the bit most people skip: they are quick-reference notes that show up in front of the cleaner on their phone, chosen from seven presets, or typed as your own.

Save the client and you land back on the list. Now open that client and press Add Location, once for every site you clean for them. A location carries its own address, a property type of Home, Office, Holiday Let, Retail or Other, and its own access notes. Locations are what jobs are actually booked against, so a client with no location is a client you cannot yet schedule work for.

Services, prices and durations

The sidebar calls it Products & Services. It holds two kinds of thing: a Service is the clean itself, and an Add-on is an extra bolted onto one. Both are priced. Only a service carries a duration, because only a service takes up a slot in the day.

Press Add Service and the drawer opens titled New Service. Press Add Extra instead and the same drawer opens titled New Add-on. The title follows the segmented control at the top, so it flips as you change your mind.

The duration is not decoration. It is what the Add Job drawer pre-fills as the length of the booking, which is what decides how much of the week view a job takes up and whether a cleaner is shown as busy at that hour. Guessing it roughly right on day one saves a lot of dragging later.

Six or eight lines is plenty to start with. Every service has an Active switch, so retiring one later does not break the jobs and invoices that already reference it.

Your cleaners

From Staff, press Add Staff Member. Before any of the name and email fields, the sheet asks a question: How should they get in? There are two answers and they suit different moments.

Either way the cleaner gets an email. It carries the address of the cleaner app and their way in, and that is the whole of their setup: no app store, no download, no licence to buy. They open the link on their phone and add it to the home screen if they want it to behave like an app.

The first job, and what your cleaner sees

Open Schedule and press Add Job, or click any empty slot in the week view to start one at that time. The drawer is long because a job can carry a lot, but the first one only needs four sections: who, where, when and who is doing it.

Leave the cleaner blank and the drawer warns you: "No cleaner assigned — you'll need to assign one before this job starts." The job is still saved, and it turns up on the dashboard under Urgent Attention until somebody is against it.

Press Add Job and you are done. The cleaner does not need to refresh anything: the job is on their phone next time it syncs, which is more or less immediately.

From there it is three taps on their side. They open the job and press Start Job, which stamps the time they actually began. They tick the checklist as they work, add photos if there are any worth having, and finish with Complete Job. A sheet asks them to confirm, tells them how many checklist items are still unticked, and then the line loses its margin mark and takes a Done stamp instead, because a finished line no longer wants anything. On your dashboard it drops into Recent Activity with a Create Invoice button beside it, which is the loop closed.

The card that keeps score

Until you have done the basics, the dashboard carries a Getting Started card under the welcome banner. It is a rocket icon, a progress bar and four rows, and the line beneath the title counts you off: "2 of 4 complete — you're almost there!"

The four rows are Add your first client, Invite a staff member, Schedule your first job and Send your first invoice, and each one is a link to the screen that clears it. A cleared row gets a filled tick and loses its arrow. Nothing here is a setting: the card counts the records in your account, so adding a client anywhere ticks the first row.

There is an X in the corner if you would rather not look at it, and the card retires itself for good once all four are done. It is also polite about loading: rather than flashing a skeleton at the top of your dashboard, it stays out of the way until it knows what it wants to say.