The business
Fresh Finish Cleaning Solutions is a London cleaning company doing end of tenancy, void and turnover work across north, north west, north east, east and west London, plus the nearer parts of Hertfordshire and Essex. Work comes in from letting agents and landlords. A cleaner goes in, the property has to be ready for whoever inspects it next, and the invoice has to go out with proof that the job was done properly.
What was taking the time
Nothing was broken, exactly. It was just spread out.
Invoices were produced in a single page tool that lived in one browser on one machine. It already knew about clients, it saved services per property, it numbered invoices in order and it printed a layout that worked. But the information only existed on that one computer, and there was no single view of what had been paid and what was still outstanding.
Before and after photos sat in folders named after the property address, one folder per job, split into Before and After. The photos came off a phone on site and then had to be saved into the right folder with the right name afterwards.
The jobs, the invoicing, the photos and the diary were four separate habits rather than one record. The owner's own description of the business was that he felt all over the place. The pieces were all there. They just never met.
What we built
We built one operations system for the business and put every part of a job into it, in the order a job actually happens.
- Jobs. Each job holds the property and postcode, the service, the agreed price, the date, the client and the status. That record is the spine everything else hangs from.
- Invoicing. We rebuilt the existing invoice tool properly, keeping the printed layout the agents already recognise, and brought the existing clients, saved services and invoice history across so nothing had to be retyped.
- A paid and unpaid view. One screen that answers what is owed and what has landed.
- Cleaners and payouts. Cleaners are attached to jobs, and what each one is owed is worked out from the jobs they actually did.
- Photo capture by the cleaner. The cleaner takes before and after photos on their phone, in the app, against the job. They file themselves, under the right property, in the right place.
- Diary. Booked jobs appear in the diary already on his phone, so the day's work is in one place rather than two.
- An agent portal. Letting agents can log in and see the before and after photos and the paperwork for their own properties.
- An inbox for tender and portal email. Email about public and housing sector opportunities is read against what the business is actually pursuing and filed as needing him, a new opportunity, or nothing to do, with the reason kept. He reads that in the portal rather than in his mail.
It runs as a web app that behaves like a normal phone app from the home screen, with pull down to refresh and a refresh when you reopen it, because most of the people using it are standing in a flat, not sitting at a desk.
How it runs day to day
A job comes in from an agent or a landlord. It goes in with the property, the service, the date and the price, and it shows up in the diary. A cleaner is attached to it and sees what they are doing and where.
On site, the cleaner photographs the property before starting and again when finished, from the app, against that job. The photos are already filed by the time they leave.
Back in the office, the invoice comes off the same job record, so the address, the service and the price are already right. Paid and unpaid is visible rather than remembered. What each cleaner is owed comes from the jobs they completed. If an agent wants proof, they open the portal and look.
What it changed
The business stopped being spread across a browser, a folder tree, a diary and a phone. One job record now drives the invoice, the pay, the photos and the diary entry, so the same information is entered once and the parts cannot drift apart.
It also changed what the business can show. Proof of work sits there, per property, for the agent to open, rather than being gathered up after the fact. That matters in this trade, where the question from an agency is usually some version of show me what your work looks like.
If you recognise your own business in this, we start with a short call to look at a real week of your work and find the parts that keep coming back.