How to set up your account
Setting CleanFlo up is not a project. It is five short cleans done in the right order, and the order is the whole trick: each one is the list the next one picks from.
On this page
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 clean 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 clean 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 three-step setup
The first time you sign in as the owner, CleanFlo asks three things before it opens the app. Each one writes the same records you would write from the sidebar, so nothing here is special or locked in.
Your business
Check your business name (it comes from sign-up) and pick the kind of cleaning you do. The trade sets sensible starting services and switches on the modules that fit.
Your first client
Type one in, import a spreadsheet of clients, or choose Just exploring? to load three clearly labelled example clients and a few cleans this week. Example data clears with one button from the dashboard. If you would rather not type your book in, the concierge offer lets you send it as it is and it is put in for you, free.
Put it in the diary
Book the first clean: who it is for, the address, the day and the start time.
Do it in this order
Fill in your company details
Open Settings → Money and put in your business name, address, phone and VAT position. This is the block that prints at the top of every invoice and quote, so get it right before the first one goes out rather than re-issuing later.
Add your first client, then their locations
A client is who pays. A location is where you clean. They are separate records on purpose, because one client usually has several sites. Add the client from Clients, then add locations from that client's own page.
Price up what you sell
In Services, put in your standard cleans with a price and an estimated duration, and your extras as add-ons. Every clean, quote and invoice line is priced from this list.
Add your cleaners
From Staff, add each cleaner. They get an email with a way in, and from that point they can open the phone app and see whatever you assign them.
Book the first clean
In Schedule, press Add clean, pick the client, the location, the date, the service and the cleaner. That is the whole loop closed: the clean appears on their phone within seconds.
Your company details
Settings is grouped into Your business (Company, Money, Clients & portal, Team & time, Safety & scheduling), Look and features (Branding, Modules), You and CleanFlo account. Company is the one that leaks out into everything your clients see. Its description says as much: "Your business details, shown on invoices, quotes and everything a client receives." Modules is where you switch whole optional features, messaging, enquiries, your website, the client referral programme, on or off for your company; a module that is off hides its own settings here and its own item in the sidebar.
The fields on Company open with 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. Further down the same tab, sections for your payment link, client portal wording, lone-worker and late-start safety alerts and your written health & safety policy statement follow, day one only needs the fields above.
Your business, your account and how CleanFlo works for you
- Settings in the sidebar opens this screen.
- Save changes is the main action on this screen.
- New, in the title bar on every screen, adds a clean, client, quote, invoice and more.
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 cleans 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 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 clean drawer pre-fills as the length of the booking, which is what decides how much of the week view a clean 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 cleans 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.
- Set a password
- You choose a temporary password and CleanFlo emails it to them. This is the default, and it is the right one when the cleaner is standing in front of you: you can read it out and watch them log in.
- Send an invite
- They get a link and pick their own password. Nothing to read out and no password sitting in an inbox. The link expires in 14 days, and until they accept it they show as pending on your team.
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 licence to buy. They install CleanFlo from the App Store or Google Play and sign in, or open the link in their phone browser.
The first clean, and what your cleaner sees
Open Schedule and press Add clean, or click any empty slot in the week view to start one at that time. The drawer is long because a clean 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 clean starts." The clean is still saved, and it turns up on the dashboard in Needs a decision, badged Unassigned, until somebody is against it.
Press Add clean and you are done. The cleaner does not need to refresh anything: the clean is on their phone next time it syncs, which is more or less immediately.
Good morning, Amara
Tuesday 11 August
From there it is three taps on their side. They open the clean and press Start clean, 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 clean. 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 up to eight rows, and the line beneath the title counts you off: "2 of 8 complete".
Thursday 13 August 2026 · Here's an overview of your business today.
The rows follow the order the work actually flows in: client and staff setup first, because nothing else can happen without them, then the sales pipeline, Publish your website, Log your first enquiry, Send your first quote, Schedule your first clean, Send your first invoice, and finally Add your first risk assessment as its own parallel track. Each row is a link to the screen that clears it, and 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. The website and enquiry rows only appear at all if Your website and Enquiries are switched on for your company under Modules, and a row that cannot be completed is dropped rather than left sitting there unticked; every other row is always there.
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.
Common questions
I skipped the setup wizard. Can I run it again?
Do I have to add every client before I can book anything?
What does my cleaner actually receive?
Where do I put my bank details so clients can pay me?
Can I import my clients from a spreadsheet?
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