Job scheduling, team management, client portals, quoting, invoicing, and quality inspections. Built around how your cleaning business actually operates.
Running a cleaning business means managing a constant flow of jobs, staff, clients, and supplies. The challenge is that "cleaning" covers an enormous range of work. A sole trader doing weekly domestic cleans operates completely differently from a company managing commercial contracts across multiple sites. End-of-tenancy cleans, post-construction cleans, and industrial deep cleans each have their own requirements. Good software needs to handle your specific mix.
At minimum, cleaning company software needs to cover:
There is a UK-specific issue worth noting. Most cleaning company software on the market is Australian, Canadian, or American. Very few options are built specifically for UK businesses. That means date formats, VAT handling, currency, and even terminology (think "janitorial" vs "cleaning") are often wrong out of the box.
The cleaning software market is fragmented. There is no single dominant UK platform. Here is an honest look at what is available and where each option sits.
| Provider | What They Offer | Pricing | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|
| ServiceM8 | Australian. Mobile-first field service management. Job scheduling, quoting, invoicing, client management. iOS only (no Android app). | From ~£9/month | Sole traders and very small teams. iOS users only. |
| Jobber | Canadian. All-in-one field service platform. Scheduling, CRM, quoting, invoicing, payments. The industry standard for small-medium service businesses. | From ~$49/month (USD pricing) | Small to medium teams. Industry standard, but USD pricing creates friction for UK users. |
| ZenMaid | US-based. Purpose-built for maid and domestic cleaning services. Scheduling, booking, payments. Very US-centric in design and terminology. | From ~$49/month | Domestic-only cleaning businesses. No commercial cleaning features. |
| Swept | Canadian. Built specifically for commercial and janitorial cleaning. Inspections, time tracking, communication, supply management. Per-location pricing. | From ~$150+/month | Commercial and contract cleaning companies. Good inspections. Expensive for smaller operations. |
| ProCleanerUK | UK-built. Desktop system for domestic and commercial cleaning. Scheduling, HR, payroll, invoicing. One of the few UK-specific options on the market. | Contact for pricing | UK cleaning businesses wanting a locally built solution. |
| CleanManager | UK presence. All-in-one platform for cleaning businesses. Scheduling, time tracking, invoicing, quality management. | Contact for pricing | Cleaning businesses wanting scheduling and time tracking in one system. |
| BookingKoala | Online booking platform for domestic cleaning. Booking engine, payments, basic scheduling. Limited functionality beyond the booking flow. | From ~$27/month | Domestic cleaning businesses focused primarily on online booking. |
All of these are subscription-based. You pay monthly, indefinitely. A cleaning business paying £100 per month for software spends £1,200 per year, £6,000 over five years, and still owns nothing. If you stop paying, you lose access to the system and, in many cases, your data.
Most of these tools were designed for a generic "service business," not specifically for cleaning. That means they handle the basics reasonably well but struggle with the details that actually matter to cleaning companies.
Recurring scheduling is surprisingly hard. Fortnightly, 4-weekly, "every other Thursday," skip-a-week patterns, one-off deep cleans slotted in alongside regulars. Most scheduling tools handle weekly repeats well enough but fall apart with anything more complex. You end up manually adjusting the schedule constantly.
Domestic and commercial cleaning are completely different businesses. Domestic work means individual clients, recurring visits, key management, and personal preferences. Commercial work means contracts, site-based inspections, SLAs, and different invoicing structures. No single off-the-shelf tool handles both well. You either pick a tool designed for one and force the other into it, or you run two separate systems.
US and Australian tools get UK details wrong. VAT handling, date formats, currency, bank payment integrations, and terminology are all wrong for UK businesses. You spend time working around these issues instead of focusing on your actual work.
Staff management goes beyond a simple rota. Travel time between jobs, key and access code management for client properties, DBS certificate tracking, and holiday management are all essential for cleaning companies. Most tools treat these as afterthoughts or do not include them at all.
Quality inspections and job management are usually separate tools. That means double entry: logging the job in one system and recording the inspection in another. Before/after photos, client sign-off, and inspection history should be part of the job record, not a separate workflow.
Commercial contract quoting is complex. Different rooms, different frequencies, different square footage, different rates for different service types. Most tools handle simple hourly rates. Anything more nuanced requires spreadsheets alongside the software.
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A bespoke system starts with your business. Not a template. Not a product demo. Your actual daily workflow, from scheduling to job completion to invoicing to client communication.
We sit down with you and map exactly how your cleaning business operates. Then we build a system that matches it precisely. The result is software where every screen, every form, and every report reflects the way your team actually works.
Every system starts with your specific requirements. Here are examples of what your system could include:
Most cleaning businesses start with a diary and a WhatsApp group. That works fine for one or two cleaners, but growth beyond three to five staff is typically the point where scheduling becomes unmanageable. Jobs get missed, double-booked, or assigned to the wrong person. Client details live in someone's head. Invoicing falls behind.
The interesting thing about the cleaning sector is that no dominant UK-built cleaning software exists. This is a genuine market gap. The platforms that UK cleaning businesses use are almost all built overseas, with UK users treated as a secondary market. ProCleanerUK and CleanManager are exceptions, but neither has achieved the kind of market dominance that would make them the obvious choice.
There are no regulatory barriers to building cleaning software. Unlike care homes (which need CQC compliance) or financial services (which need FCA approval), cleaning software has no government standards it must meet. That makes it a straightforward sector for bespoke development: the system only needs to match how your business works, with no external compliance framework to satisfy.
ESRE builds cleaning company systems for a one-off cost. No monthly subscription. No per-user fees. No price increases. You pay once and you own the system.
Cleaning businesses usually combine a job management tool with a separate accounting package, and often add other tools on top. For a company with 5-10 cleaners, the monthly spend commonly looks something like this.
| System | Typical Monthly Cost | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Job management / scheduling | £30 to £200 | ServiceM8 (from ~£15), Jobber (from ~£31), Swept (from ~£120), ZenMaid (from ~£18) |
| Accounting / invoicing | £20 to £40 | Xero, QuickBooks, FreeAgent |
| Customer communication / booking | £15 to £50 | BookingKoala (~£22), or separate SMS/email tool |
| Quality inspection / reporting (commercial) | £20 to £80 | OrangeHRM, Swept inspection module, or manual |
| Total monthly cost | £85 to £370 | |
| Five-year total | £5,100 to £22,200 |
The job management tool handles scheduling but not accounting. The accounting tool handles invoices but not job allocation. Quality inspections live in a separate app or on paper. Client preferences and access codes sit in a shared note that may or may not be up to date. The "connected" cleaning company is actually three or four disconnected tools.
| System Scope | Typical One-Off Cost | Replaces |
|---|---|---|
| Core: scheduling, client management, invoicing | £6,000 to £12,000 | Job management + accounting subscriptions |
| Full: above plus team management, inspections, client portal, reporting | £12,000 to £25,000 | All four subscription categories above |
| Multi-service: domestic, commercial, and specialist with different workflows | £20,000 to £40,000 | All subscriptions + commercial contract management tools |
A cleaning company paying £200 per month across its tools spends £12,000 over five years and owns nothing. A bespoke system at £12,000 pays for itself in under three years, replaces every subscription and the spreadsheets alongside them, and belongs to the business permanently.
Every system we build, the client owns all the code. There is no vendor lock-in. No proprietary platform you depend on. No API that gets deprecated when the vendor decides to change direction.
What we build is not one screen. It is a connected data architecture from which multiple applications emerge. Client, job, and team data is entered once and appears wherever it is needed.
All of these surfaces draw from the same data. A client who reschedules via the portal sees updated availability instantly. A photo taken by a cleaner on-site is immediately visible to the office and linked to the job and the invoice.
We train you and your team to evolve the system using AI. Since December 2025, AI tools have reached the maturity to work reliably alongside people for maintaining and extending systems. We set up your AI to understand your specific codebase, with failsafe environments, version control, and automated backups.
Because the data architecture already exists, adding new functionality is straightforward. Expanding into commercial cleaning? The contract management and SLA tracking connects to the same client and team data. Adding supply ordering? It links to the same job and site records. Building a franchise model? The multi-site management builds on the architecture already in place. The initial build creates the foundation. Everything after that is incremental.
See examples of what we build across different sectors.
After a few years, most cleaning software subscriptions have cost you what bespoke costs once. And at the end of it, you own nothing. Bespoke is a capital cost. It stays yours.
Your cleaners access the system at no extra cost. Add as many team members as you need without your software bill increasing every time you hire.
Your client data and business records on servers in the UK. No overseas vendor routing your data through infrastructure you have no visibility of.
A core cleaning management system covering scheduling, clients, and invoicing typically takes four to eight weeks from first conversation to live deployment.
A core cleaning management system typically takes four to eight weeks from first conversation to live deployment. More complex systems with multiple service types, client portals, and data migration take eight to fourteen weeks.
Yes. We can build a system that handles both, with different workflows for each. Domestic cleaning typically involves recurring schedules, individual client preferences, and simple invoicing. Commercial cleaning requires contract management, site-based inspections, SLAs, and different billing structures. A bespoke system accommodates both under one roof.
We are always available for support, changes, and enhancements. But because you own the code and we train your AI to understand it, you are not dependent on us for day-to-day changes. That is the point.
Your system is cloud-hosted on secure UK-based servers. Your data belongs to you. Every change is recorded in real time to a write-ahead log (WAL), so nothing is ever lost. You can also back up locally on a schedule for additional peace of mind.
We can build the system to work on any device with a web browser. If your team uses a mix of phones, tablets, or computers, the system works on all of them.