Invoicing for house cleaners

Four kinds of job, three different billing problems

Cleaning looks like one service and bills like three. Getting the structure right is most of the work.

The standard clean

Your recurring work — the same house, the same rooms, the same price, every week or every fortnight. The price rarely changes, so the invoice is nearly identical each time. What varies is how you batch it: one invoice per visit is tidy but relentless, and most cleaners settle on one invoice at the end of the month listing each visit with its date.

The deep clean

A one-off, priced by hours or by the size of the property, usually quoted before you agree to it. This is where an estimate earns its keep — a deep clean quoted at four hours that takes seven is a conversation you want to have before you start, not on the invoice.

The move-out clean

The highest-variance job you do, and often the one where the person paying is not the person whose house it was. A letting agent or landlord wants an invoice addressed to the agency, with the property address on it so they can match it to a tenancy. Bill “Sarah” when the payer is the agency and the invoice sits in someone’s inbox unpaid for three weeks.

Add-ons

Inside the oven, inside the fridge, windows, carpets, inside kitchen cupboards. These are the lines customers query, and they are the lines most likely to be quietly absorbed into a total. Do not absorb them. “Inside the oven — $45” on its own line is a price the customer agreed to. Buried in “deep clean — $265” it is a number they will ask about.

Bill before you leave

For one-off work, the ten minutes in the car before you drive to the next job is the best moment you will get. The customer is still in the house looking at a clean kitchen, the add-ons are fresh in your head, and you are not reconstructing four jobs from memory on a Sunday evening.

For regulars, pick a day of the month and do the whole round at once. Consistency matters more than timing — a customer who knows the invoice arrives on the 1st pays on the 3rd.

Getting paid

Domestic cleaning is largely paid by bank transfer or a payment app, and the fastest thing you can do is put the details on the invoice itself rather than in a message. A short window suits this work — seven days, or a specific date rather than Net 30, which means nothing to somebody whose house you clean.

Agency and letting work is different. They will have a process, they will want the invoice by email to an accounts address, and they may well want a reference number. Ask for it before you send.

What Invoice Tiger does for a cleaning round

• Your regulars are saved. Name, address, email, entered once. The second invoice for a regular is a few taps.
• Your jobs are saved. Standard clean, deep clean, oven, fridge, windows — each with its usual price. Pull them in rather than typing them.
• Estimates for the variable work. Quote a deep clean or a move-out on the same workflow, with its own numbering.
• Search by name. When an agency asks for a copy of a move-out invoice from March, you find it by typing the property.
• Share however you already talk to them. The PDF goes out through Messages, WhatsApp or Mail from the iOS share sheet.

What it deliberately does not do

Most software marketed to cleaners is field-service software: scheduling, routing, crew dispatch, timesheets, customer portals. Invoice Tiger has none of that, and if you are running crews across a city you should buy one of those instead.

There is also no automatic recurring invoice. Your fortnightly customer does not get billed by itself — you make the invoice, in about the time it takes to send a text. For a one-person round, that is a fair trade against a monthly subscription to a dispatch system you would never open.

And it does not know whether you have been paid. Nothing turns green; your bank account is the record. That is the same trade as not routing your money through an app.