A Week in the Life of a Cleaning Company
Alie Slater
27th March 2022
Squeegee Clean Co. is a residential and commercial cleaning company I, Sarah, started in beautiful Herefordshire, U.K. It was my dream to own my own business. After 5 years of hard work, I now have 3 other workers. I’ve just invested in a new app, ironically named, Squeegee® to help me manage the business. Right away I took the Udemy course provided by Squeegee to learn everything the app had to offer and how to use it. That was a big help! The team and I have now been using the app for several months. This is a week in my life:
Sunday: Let’s Manage the Workers for the Week
After a lovely weekend with my family, and a gorgeous roast dinner, I am sitting down at my laptop to do a bit of admin work. I love that Squeegee has a desktop version and a mobile app. On Sundays, I have to make sure that our jobs for next week are all covered by myself and my 3 workers. I log in to my account and open the Multi Planner. I can see here all of the jobs we have for the next week as well as my workers at the top. I have organized our jobs by routes and teams. On Mondays, for example, my Monmouth team of workers head to that area to clean two homes. Squeegee allows me to assign each of my customers to a route and a team so that we can make sure we are scheduling them on the days we will be in the area already. With gas prices going up we try to not schedule jobs far distances from each other on the same day.
All of my workers will be available this week so the schedule is all set to go.
Monday: Squeegee Clean Co. Uses the Day Pilot to Get to Their Jobs
This morning, after getting the kids off to school and grabbing a coffee, I’ve just picked up one of my workers and we are headed to Ledbury to clean two homes. Since we’ve started using the Day Pilot on Squeegee, our team has commented how much easier it is to navigate the route to the client’s homes. All I need to do is select the current day in the Day Pilot and click on the car icon on the map and select how I would like to navigate to my customer's home. I can choose either with their address or the coordinates. I use the address for the first client and my phone then gives me the option to use the navigation apps on my phone. It’s so simple!
Tuesday: Squeegee Clean Co. Needs to Send Out a Quote
While out working yesterday, Sophie, one of my workers, found a potential new client. I am so excited to finally be able to send out professional-looking quotes to our customers. Sophie has Canvassing privileges on the Squeegee app so she was able to go right in and add the customer’s information from her mobile phone. This morning, I am going to send out the quote. I logged into my account and went to my customer list. I was able to find the customer’s profile Sophie had made and based on the notes that were left, I knew what the client needed. I made the quote with little effort and In less than a minute, I emailed it over to the client. I got a notification on the app under Alerts that the quote had been accepted so I went into her profile and created the job straight away. She is now on the schedule for bi-weekly cleans beginning next Tuesday as part of our Ledbury route.
Wednesday: There is Invoicing to Be Done!
Myself and 2 of my workers have just finished cleaning one of our largest homes. After packing up the car and saying goodbye to our client, I am going to record this job as complete and send out the invoice. Before using Squeegee I never sent invoices. What a difference it has made to my accounts. Being able to connect my client’s payments to invoices has saved me so much time following up on the money we were owed. I can’t even tell you how many times I forgot that I hadn’t been paid by a customer. I open my Squeegee mobile app and go to the WORK PLANNER. I select the client who brings up the job information on the right-hand side. I then click on the pink button at the bottom and choose DONE. I then select the pink button again and choose CREATE INVOICE. An invoice is then generated and once I check everything is correct, I select CREATE INVOICE at the top right side. The invoice is then emailed right over to our client. I love that I could also choose to send an SMS message with a link to the invoice if I wanted to.
Thursday: The Customers Have Paid Their Invoices!
My lovely clients from yesterday all paid their invoices! Squeegee has some great payment options besides cash and cheque. GoCardless and Stripe are also offered and several of my clients have decided to use these options. Our customer Frank did a bank transfer to us straight away. I went into the INVOICES tab and clicked on Frank’s invoice. At the bottom button that’s pink, I selected PAYMENT and chose the invoice where the payment would go. Then I selected BANK TRANSFER and the account the transfer was made into. Then I selected the button at the bottom “ RECORD £60 AS A BANK TRANSFER”. Simple as that! Frank then got an email showing him that his invoice was paid that he could save for his records.
Friday: Accounting and Recording Expenses
I’ve popped down to the shops to stock up on cleaning supplies for our cleaning caddies. We run through things like bleach, gloves, and bathroom cleaner. I use Squeegee to record all of my expenses. Squeegee allows me to also keep track of all of the VAT I have paid for expenses so that I can get that deducted from the VAT we pay as a company every year.
Before I started using Squeegee I had an accounting software subscription and every Friday evening I would spend several hours doing the bookkeeping for the week. What I really wanted to do was watch a movie with my kids. Tonight, I am going to just quickly go into the app and reconcile the bank account against the expenses I had this week and the invoices that had been paid. Squeegee has some nice accounting features I can’t wait to take more advantage of now that I have switched solely to using this app for all of my bookkeeping needs.
Saturday: It’s Time to Confirm Appointments for the Next Week Using SMS Messaging
We took a quick trip to Ross on Wye for the market and after a beautiful walk along the river, we headed home to let the little ones play in the garden. I decided to take this time to quickly send out the SMS reminders to our clients for next week and confirm appointments. I used to spend so much of my weekend texting all of our clients. I had to go into my calendar and look at which clients we had for the upcoming week and then find their contact in my phone and text them individually. Now, all I have to do is open my app to my customer’s profiles and select the MESSAGE tab at the top and send them their reminders. With two-way messaging, my clients can respond to me and I will get their message in the app. It’s so nice having all communication with our customers kept directly in the app.
Sunday: Squeegee Clean Co. Can Now Use the Squeegee® Customer Portal!
Not long after signing up to use Squeegee, I decided I wanted to provide my clients with the new customer portal that was offered. On Squeegee’s Customer Portal page I registered my interest and soon after I was contacted by their team to begin the process. My clients can now easily log in and pay their invoices, see upcoming appointments, and request services. This new feature will be a game-changer to my business.
What a wonderful week we’ve had at Squeegee Clean Co. I couldn’t do it without my team and Squeegee App. I can’t wait to see where our business will be by this time next year!
