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The round is the business

A window cleaning business is not a series of jobs, it is a cycle. Every customer sits on a four, six or eight-week rotation, and the whole enterprise depends on that rotation actually happening.

The failure mode is well known to anyone who has run a round: a week of bad weather, a van off the road, or one holiday, and the cycle slips. Slip far enough and a customer assumes you have stopped coming, and the next window cleaner who knocks gets the work.

What software has to do here is unglamorous: rebuild the schedule automatically, show clearly who is overdue, and make it obvious when a cycle is drifting before the customer notices.

Domestic and commercial are different businesses

Most window cleaning operations run both, and they need handling differently.

Domestic is high-volume, low-value, geographically clustered and paid immediately or by standing order. The operational problems are round discipline and collection: knowing who has paid without keeping it in your head.

CleanFlo does not take that money. It holds no Direct Debit or standing order mandate for you, and never sees a payment happen. What it does is put your own payment link on the invoice as a Pay now button if you have one, chase an unpaid invoice by email at seven, fourteen and thirty days overdue, and let you record a payment against the invoice when it lands, so who has paid is a list rather than a memory.

Commercial is lower-volume, higher-value, invoiced on 30-day terms with VAT, and increasingly requires the same compliance documentation as any other contractor: risk assessments for work at height, equipment records and insurance evidence.

Running both out of one system is the point. Running domestic in a notebook and commercial in accounting software is how the two halves stop reconciling.

The exterior round: gutters, fascias and jet washing

Most window rounds carry exterior work, and most of it is sold to customers who are already on the round. The gutter clear in October, the fascias while the pole is out, the drive after a wet winter. It is the highest-margin work on a window book and the easiest to forget to offer.

In CleanFlo it is services rather than a module, and the catalogue starts stocked with them. The library offers a Gutter, Exterior & Jet Washing shelf alongside the window one, and you tick what you sell, editing the price and the time before anything is added. Nothing reaches your account until you confirm it. Every figure below is the app’s own starting suggestion rather than a researched market rate or anything CleanFlo charges: a place to start arguing from, not a price list to adopt.

What that buys you is the same as the round: put the gutter clear on the rota as a job, on its own or on the same visit as the windows, with the property’s access notes and the customer’s history already on it. The cleaner meets it on their phone with a checklist and takes photographs against it, which matters more here than on glass, because a cleared gutter and a blocked one look identical from the pavement. Twelve photographs a visit, labelled before, after or note, and the pair drawn side by side for the customer in their portal.

Two honest limits. The exterior work is priced and scheduled like any other service; there is nothing in the app that knows about pressure washing itself, no surface-area sum, no water figure and no drying time. And CleanFlo will not sequence the round for you: there is no route optimisation here or anywhere else in the product, so which order you do the street in is still yours.

If exterior work is the business rather than an add-on to a round, the one-off and specialist cleans page is the one written for that, and it is the same account either way.

What this does not do

The repeat cycles are weekly, fortnightly and monthly. There is no four-weekly or six-weekly setting, and no bespoke interval, which is worth knowing on a round that runs on four and six weeks: monthly gives you twelve visits a year where four-weekly gives thirteen, and the alternative is booking the round as dated visits rather than as a repeat.

There is no route optimisation. CleanFlo does not order your day by drive time, work out the shortest loop round an estate, or re-sequence the round when one customer cancels. It shows you who is due, who has gone quiet, and where they are. The ordering is yours.

Nothing reports by area or by round either. Margin comes out by customer, by site and clean by clean; no report groups a street, a postcode or a whole Wednesday round together, so "is this round still worth keeping" is a question you answer by reading the sites on it.

CleanFlo does not collect the money. It holds no Direct Debit or standing order mandate for you and never sees a payment happen, so a round where half the customers pay by standing order is a round whose collection you still run yourself. What it does is put your own payment link on the invoice as a Pay now button if you have one, chase an unpaid invoice by email at seven, fourteen and thirty days overdue, and hold a payment against the invoice once you record that it landed. That is the difference between knowing who has paid and being paid.

Nor is there GPS tracking of a van or a cleaner. Starting and finishing a clean stamps one coarse location fix each, against the property, and nothing follows anybody between them or after the last job of the day. Those stamps are a real record of when work began and finished, and the hours that appear in reports are still estimated from the job as scheduled rather than taken from a verified timesheet.

All five are worth knowing before you buy rather than in week three. If turn-by-turn round optimisation is the thing you are actually shopping for, this is not it, and we would rather say so with a name attached: Squeegee lists optimised route navigation and grouping jobs into rounds, and collects by Direct Debit mandate through GoCardless, which covers two of the five above and a third thing we do not do at all. CleanFlo vs Squeegee is written for the reader who has to choose between the two, and it does not pretend we win on rounds.

Working at height is the compliance line

Window cleaning carries a genuinely higher risk profile than most cleaning work. Falls from height remain one of the most serious hazards in the trade, and commercial clients know it.

Water-fed pole systems have reduced ladder work substantially, but they have not eliminated it, and they introduce their own considerations: water storage weight in vehicles, working near overhead cables, and slip risk from run-off.

For commercial contracts, expect to be asked for a written risk assessment covering work at height, evidence of equipment inspection, and training records before you are engaged. Holding those against each site rather than in a folder is what makes producing them straightforward.