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For house cleaning: the first clean, and every clean after it

A first deep clean, then the same house every week or every two: cleaning is quoted from the size of the home and the hours it takes, and for a regular customer the job is the visit that comes round again. TailGateBid quotes the first clean, repeats the rest, and can send the invoice when each one is done.

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The work

The regular clean: kitchen, bathrooms, floors, dusting, beds. The deep clean that comes first, or once a season. Move-in and move-out cleans, and cleaning up after a remodel. And the extras a customer asks for by name: inside the oven, inside the refrigerator, the inside of the windows, laundry.

How a cleaning is sized

  1. Start with the home: its square feet, and how many bedrooms and bathrooms it has.
  2. The hours on the quote are the people times the hours they are in the house.
  3. Your own pace is one way to size the next home. Take a home you have cleaned, and divide its square feet by the hours worked. Divide the new home's square feet by that pace, and you have its hours.
  4. Say what kind of clean it is. The CDC keeps three jobs apart: cleaning removes most germs, dirt and impurities from a surface; sanitizing reduces germs to levels that public health codes consider safe; disinfecting kills most germs: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, When and How to Clean and Disinfect Your Home.
  5. Disinfecting takes longer. The same page says to clean the surface first, then to leave the disinfectant on long enough to kill the germs. That is the contact time in the product's directions, and the surface should stay wet for all of it.
  6. And the product matters. The EPA says a sanitizing product kills bacteria and is not intended to kill viruses, while a disinfecting product kills viruses and bacteria: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, products that disinfect, sanitize and clean.

An example with made-up numbers, not a going rate

Say the house is 1,800 square feet, with 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms, and say a first clean of a house like it takes 2 people 4.5 hours: 9 hours on the quote. Keep that figure. 1,800 square feet in 9 hours is 200 square feet for each hour worked. The next house, at 2,400 square feet, would be 12 hours at that pace.

A first clean, worked through

Sample

Sample Cleaning Co.

First deep clean, 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms

  • Deep clean, 2 peopleQty 9 hours$432.00
  • Inside of the ovenQty 1$35.00
  • Inside of the refrigeratorQty 1$30.00
  • Windows, inside, by the windowQty 14$84.00
Subtotal
$581.00
Sales tax (7.25%)
$0.00
Total
$581.00

Only you see this part. Your customer never does.

What it costs you
$345.00
What is left for you
$236.00

You keep about $41 of every $100

A sample; its prices are made up and are not a going rate. The clean is charged by the hour for each person, so it grows with the house: 2 people for 4.5 hours is 9 hours. The oven, the refrigerator and the windows are counted. Nothing here is ticked as taxed and no deposit is asked for: before you send one of your own, check whether cleaning is taxed in your state. At these made-up costs the clean leaves $236.00 of the $581.00: about $41 of every $100.

What TailGateBid does for a cleaning business

  • The clean that comes back

    Make the clean a job that repeats: weekly, every two weeks, monthly, or every so many days. TailGateBid creates each visit ahead of time, with the same people on it. Tick one box and the invoice goes out by itself when a visit is marked complete. Stop the series, and the visits that have not started are removed. How jobs and the schedule work.

  • Your customer knows who is coming

    The day before each visit your customer gets a reminder by email. "I am on my way" emails them who is on the way. From their own private page they can confirm the visit or ask to move it, and the request reaches you. Notes for getting in, a door code or where to park, are kept with the address.

  • The first clean, quoted

    The first visit to a home is the one to quote. Take a few photos of the rooms, say what the customer wants, and Bid Partner, the AI tool in TailGateBid, drafts the quote from your rates. With no rate set it does not stop: it uses a typical price and labels it "Typical", yours to replace, and your figure is used from then on. Add the oven or the windows as extras the customer can tick, and they sign on their own phone. Nothing is sent until you press Send. How quotes work.

  • Your crew in Spanish, your customer in English

    Each person uses TailGateBid in their own language, and quotes, invoices and emails go out in the language you set for each customer. How the two languages work.

  • A cleaning business website

    Your account includes a website, hosted at no extra cost: what you clean, in your own words, the towns you cover, and a form where a visitor asks for a quote. After an invoice is paid your customer is asked to rate the job, and a review goes on the website only once you approve it, with a first name and a last initial. What is on the website.

What an hour has to bring in

A cleaning business sells hours, so start with what one costs you: wages, what you pay on top of them, supplies, the drive between houses. The hour calculator works that out, and the job price calculator shows what the price of a clean leaves you.

Then put the price on paper: what goes on an estimate, in order, with one filled in.

This page is about one trade. TailGateBid works the same way for any other, and Bid Partner is built to price a job in any of them: how it works for your trade.

Sources

Related

Quote the first clean, then set it to repeat.

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