Spatchr for House Cleaning
Nothing here gets measured. It gets timed.
A clean is an hours estimate that either held or did not. Track the real time against the quoted time and you find out which customers are worth keeping within about six weeks.
Unit economics
How a house cleaning job gets priced
House cleaning is the one trade in this group with no measurement step at all. Floor area is a weak predictor of how long a house takes — a cluttered two-bedroom flat can run longer than an empty four-bedroom, and the difference is occupancy and standards rather than square footage. So the unit is the hour, and the quote is a estimate of hours multiplied by a rate. That estimate comes from a walk-through: how many bathrooms, how much surface clutter, whether there are pets, what the customer means by clean. What makes this workable rather than guesswork is recording the actual time against the job. Time entries on each visit turn the quote into a testable claim. After a month you know that the Thursday house you quoted at three hours consistently takes four, which means it has been twenty-five percent underpriced since the day you took it on. That is the entire discipline of this trade. Almost nobody quotes badly on purpose; they quote once, never check, and absorb the drift for years. Recording hours is unglamorous and it is the difference between a round that pays and one that merely occupies you.
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Estimated hours
Rate multiplied by the walk-through estimate
The whole quote rests on this one judgement, which is why it must be checked against reality afterwards rather than trusted permanently.
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Bathrooms and kitchens
Weighted heavily in the estimate
Wet rooms take disproportionately longer than living space. A house's bathroom count predicts cleaning time far better than its total floor area does.
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Clutter and occupancy
Condition adjustment
Cleaning around belongings is slower than cleaning open surfaces. A family of five with two dogs and a home office is a different job from a couple who are out all day, in the same house.
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First clean versus maintenance
Typically 1.5x to 2x for the first visit
The initial deep clean carries everything the previous months left behind. Quoting it at the maintenance rate is the most common and most expensive mistake in this trade.
Minimum charge
Set a per-visit minimum of two or three hours when you build the catalog. Below that the travel and setup swamp the work, and a one-hour booking is almost never worth the slot it occupies in a route that could hold a full clean.
Cadence and routing
Getting back there at the right time
Domestic cleaning is the most consistently recurring trade here — fortnightly is the common default, weekly for busier households — and it runs all year with no seasonal shape at all. That regularity makes the round predictable in a way the outdoor trades never are, and it puts the operational weight somewhere unusual: on access rather than on scheduling. Most cleans happen with nobody home, so the round depends on keys, codes, alarm sequences and which neighbour holds the spare. Those live as notes on the property, because a cleaner who arrives without the code has lost the entire slot, not just a few minutes. Recurring plans generate the visits so the fortnightly pattern maintains itself, and territories keep the day tight — a three-hour clean followed by a thirty-minute drive is a badly built day when the same three hours could have been followed by a five-minute one. The scheduling pressure specific to this trade is the cancellation. Domestic customers cancel far more than commercial ones, usually at short notice, and a cancelled fortnightly slot is revenue that cannot be recovered later. Seeing the pattern per customer is what tells you which relationships are actually worth their place in the round.
Schematic — Tuesday, 10 stops
Your service catalog
What you start with
Spatchr does not ship a starter catalog for house cleaning — the one bundled template covers exterior cleaning. You build yours, which takes about ten minutes and is worth doing properly once. Here is the shape most operators land on.
- Maintenance cleanhour
The recurring core, quoted as an hours estimate at your standard rate. Everything else in the catalog is defined relative to this one.
- First or deep cleanhour
Typically one and a half to two times the maintenance estimate. Quote it separately and explicitly so the customer understands why visit one costs more than visit two.
- End of tenancyhour
A different job with a different standard, usually against a landlord's checklist. Worth its own service because the acceptance criteria are external rather than yours.
- Interior windowseach
Priced per pane rather than hourly, and the natural bridge to a window cleaning round if you run one.
- Oven cleaningeach
A fixed-price add-on rather than an hourly one. Sold well, it is the most reliable margin in domestic cleaning.
- Laundry and linenhour
An optional extra some households value highly. Hourly, and worth capping so it does not quietly consume the slot.
Proof and paperwork
Showing the customer what they paid for
Interior work carries a trust burden nothing else on this list does. You are alone in somebody's home, among their possessions, usually while they are out. That makes the record less about proving the work and more about accountability. Which cleaner attended, when they arrived, how long they stayed, what was and was not done. Time entries and visit history answer all of it, and being able to answer immediately is what keeps a small misunderstanding from becoming a lost customer. The photographs worth taking are exceptions rather than results. A stain that will not lift, a broken fitting found on arrival, an appliance that was already damaged. Photograph and note them at the visit and raise them before the customer does — in a house, the discovered problem is always assumed to be yours. Invoicing tends to be monthly rather than per visit, and it should be built from completed visits so it can be checked line by line rather than accepted on faith.
An hours estimate is a claim, and claims can be checked
Every house cleaning quote is a prediction. Three hours, fortnightly, at your rate. The customer agrees, the arrangement starts, and in most businesses nobody ever revisits whether the prediction was accurate.
That is where the money goes. Not in dramatic mistakes, but in a quiet fifteen percent — the house that always takes three and a half hours and was quoted at three, repeated twenty-six times a year for four years. Nobody notices because no single visit feels wrong. It only exists as a pattern, and the pattern is invisible unless somebody writes the hours down.
Recording time against visits turns the estimate into something falsifiable. After six weeks you can see which properties run over, by how much, and whether it is getting worse. That is not administration for its own sake; it is the only mechanism this trade has for finding out whether its prices are real.
Why square footage would mislead you
It is tempting to price cleaning the way the outdoor trades price surfaces, and it does not work.
The variables that actually drive cleaning time are occupancy and standards. How many people live there. Whether there are pets. How much is on the surfaces before you can clean them. Whether the customer’s idea of clean involves skirting boards. None of that correlates with floor area, and some of it correlates inversely — larger houses are often owned by people who are out of them more.
Bathrooms are the closest thing to a reliable predictor, and even that is a weighting rather than a formula. Which is why the honest answer here is a walk-through, an hours estimate, and then the discipline of checking it.
The first clean is a different job
The most expensive mistake in domestic cleaning is quoting the initial visit at the maintenance rate.
A maintenance clean removes two weeks of ordinary living. A first clean removes however long it has been since anyone did it properly, which might be months and occasionally years. It is routinely half again as long, sometimes double, and it happens on the day you are trying to make a good impression.
Quoting them separately is not upselling. It is describing two different pieces of work accurately, and customers accept it readily when it is explained before they book rather than discovered when the invoice arrives.
Trust, keys and the discovered problem
This is the only trade on this site that happens inside somebody’s home while they are elsewhere, and everything operationally distinctive about it follows from that.
Access is the first-order risk. A code that changed, a key that was not returned, a neighbour who is out — any of them costs the entire visit, not a few minutes, because there is no version of the job you can do from the doorstep. Access details belong on the property record where the whole team can reach them.
The second is the discovered problem. A chipped tile, a scratched worktop, a stain that will not come out. If the customer finds it first, it is yours by default, regardless of what happened. If you photograph it on arrival and mention it that day, it is information. The gap between those two outcomes is about ninety seconds of effort at the visit.
Questions people actually ask
- Why is there no measuring in this trade?
- Because floor area does not predict cleaning time. Occupancy, clutter, pet ownership, the number of wet rooms and the customer's own standards matter far more than square footage, and a cluttered small flat routinely takes longer than an empty large house. Measuring would produce a confident number that is wrong.
- How do I know whether my quote was right?
- Record the actual hours against each visit and compare. Within about six weeks the pattern is unmistakable — some houses consistently run over and some run under. That comparison is the single most valuable thing this trade can get from software, and it is invisible to anyone quoting from memory.
- Should the first clean cost more?
- Almost always, by fifty to a hundred percent. The first visit absorbs however long it has been since the last proper clean, and pricing it at the maintenance rate means working a very long day for the same money and starting the relationship at a loss you never recover.
- How do I keep track of keys and alarm codes?
- As notes on the property record, so they travel with the address rather than living in one person's phone. Access is the operational risk in this trade — arriving without the code loses the whole slot — and it is also why property notes matter more here than photographs do.
- Can I see which customers cancel most?
- Visit history shows completed against cancelled per property, which surfaces the pattern people usually only sense. A fortnightly customer who cancels a third of the time is occupying a slot that a reliable one could fill, and that is a decision worth making from data rather than irritation.
Neighbouring trades
Curated by real overlap — shared routes, shared ladders, shared customers — not by an alphabetical list of everything else.
Put your house cleaning pricing on the phone
Before you download
Android and the browser do different jobs
Sign in once. After that the Android app runs on the phone's own database — measure, photograph and price a job in a basement or a dead zone, and it syncs the moment you have signal again.
The web app is a live connection to your data, so it needs a signal and a sign-in.
| Capability | Android app | Web browser |
|---|---|---|
| Works with no signal | Yes — after your first sign-in | No — needs a connection |
| Sign-in required | Yes, once | Yes, every session |
| Measure on site, camera, GPS | Yes | Limited |
| Invoices, estimates, reports | Yes | Yes |
| Best for | The truck, the roof, the yard | The office desk |