Where the office hours go
Cleaning and facilities
A cleaning or facilities business is two operations stacked on each other: the work done on site, and the office work that proves it was done. These pages take the second one apart and say which parts of it run on rules.
The office side of a cleaning round #
Nobody starts a cleaning company because they enjoy building rotas. What gets sold is simple enough: a site, a frequency, a specification and a price. What turns it into a business with an office is everything stacked around that.
-
The rota
It has to hold across every site and every part time cleaner, most of them working before the building opens or after it closes.
-
Cover
For when somebody calls in sick at six in the morning and a school needs its corridors done by seven.
-
Site sheets
Signing in records that prove attendance.
-
Quality checks
Periodic checks, and the report a contract manager expects at month end.
-
The quote
For a new enquiry, which needs somebody to walk the building first.
-
The invoice run
In which almost every contract bills on its own terms.
-
The complaint call
About a missed clean, and it usually arrives before the office is open.
That admin is heavier than it looks because the workforce is spread out and almost nothing is observed directly. If it is not recorded, it did not happen, and the rules around the recording are real.
20 minutes
Uninterrupted rest break, where a worker works more than six hours a day
GOV.UK, Rest breaks at work
11 hours
Rest between working days, which bites as soon as somebody does an early and a late
GOV.UK, Rest breaks at work
£12.71
National Living Wage an hour for workers aged 21 and over, from 1 April 2026
GOV.UK, National Minimum Wage and National Living Wage rates
Travelling from one work assignment to another counts towards the hours that must be paid at the minimum wage, so a round that looks tight on a map can be expensive on a payslip. Because most of the cost of a contract is hours, a small error in how hours are captured is a large error in a margin.
How to tell which parts run on rules #
The test is not whether a job is dull. It is whether the same trigger produces the same steps and the same output every time, with nobody deciding anything.
Runs on rules
- Reissuing that rota each week with the same people in the same slots
- The question underneath a sick call: which of my people is trained for that site, cleared where clearance is needed, and not already over their hours
- Raising an invoice from an agreed schedule
The question underneath the sick call is a lookup.
Needs a person
- Building the first version of a rota, because it is about people, travel and what a site will accept
- Handling a sick call at six in the morning, which is judgement under pressure
- Deciding what to credit after a complaint
The full sort is in which parts of running a cleaning business run on rules.
What these pages will not do #
- Name a product
- Explain how to wire anything together
Whether any of this is worth automating depends on how many sites you run, how much of your work is periodic rather than daily, and how many of your people are shared between contracts, which is what the free audit is for. To put a number on the office hours first, use the free tools.
Cleaning and facilities
Schedules, site sheets, checks and the invoices behind every contract.
- What cleaning admin runs on rules A sorting test for the office side of a cleaning round, job by job
- Rotas and shift cover Building a rota that holds, and what happens when the 6am call comes in
- Site sheets and sign off Why paper on a clipboard at the back of a cupboard costs more than it looks
- Quality audits and client reports The monthly report nobody is paid to write, and the part of it that is judgement
- Quoting a cleaning contract The repeatable parts of a quote, and the survey judgement that is not one of them
- Invoicing per contract and per site Why a monthly invoice run takes days when every contract bills differently
- The call about a missed clean What a complaint call really costs, and what it tells you about the week before it
- PPM schedules What a planned maintenance schedule has to hold, and the point it stops being a spreadsheet
- Onboarding a new cleaner The paperwork that has to exist before a first shift, and how much of it repeats
Where these numbers come from
- GOV.UK, National Minimum Wage and National Living Wage rates , read 19 September 2026
- GOV.UK, Working hours for which the minimum wage must be paid , read 19 September 2026
- GOV.UK, Rest breaks at work , read 19 September 2026
- HSE, Protecting lone workers: guidance for employers , read 19 September 2026
Last checked 19 September 2026.
Our workings are on the methodology page .
Free audit
A free audit for cleaning and facilities businesses
One call, walking through a normal week. You get the tracker of every repeated job ranked by hours, a map of the top five, and the number of hours a month they could give back. Yours to keep either way.