Know your numbers without a second app.

Where cleaning companies lose money

Most cleaning companies don't lose money in one big mistake. They lose it in four small leaks that nobody sees until tax time.

• Late payments. The clean was in March. The e-transfer is "coming". Until it lands, you paid the crew out of your own pocket.
• Untracked expenses. The gas, the mop heads, the parking ticket outside the condo. Each one is small, and none of them made it into a spreadsheet.
• Underpriced jobs. A move-out that took two cleaners six hours, quoted like a standard clean. It looked like a good Saturday. It wasn't.
• Payroll surprises. Hours added up from texts, a tip that never reached the cleaner, and a payroll total that doesn't match what you thought the month cost.

Here's the real problem: the money in your bank account isn't your profit. It's revenue, minus everything you haven't paid yet, plus deposits for jobs you haven't done. Owners who run their business off the bank balance are always a little surprised, and usually not in a good way.

Cleaning business accounting software that keeps the books as you work

In More Knocks, your books aren't a separate job. They fill in as you work. Every payment a customer makes, every receipt you snap, every pay run and every card fee lands in the same place, tied to the job or the person it came from. So you see your numbers in real time, not once a month after an evening with a spreadsheet.

When your accountant asks, the reports are ready: a profit and loss statement, revenue by month, refunds and gift card balances, and a quarterly sales tax summary. Export it all whenever you need to.

Getting paid: where your revenue comes from

Revenue starts at the booking. Customers pay a deposit by card when they book, and the card is saved for the balance. When the clean is done, you check the job and charge the balance with one button. Every payment lands in your books with the job it belongs to, so you can see what each customer paid without opening Stripe. More in cleaning business payments.

The tax side is handled on the invoice. Sales tax is calculated for you, your HST number is on every invoice, and the HST you've collected adds up for the quarter. More in invoices with the tax done.

Tracking what you spend

Snap a photo of a receipt, and the expense is read and logged for you. You answer two questions, who paid and how, and you're done. Mileage is tracked too. Duplicate expenses are flagged, so the same receipt doesn't get counted twice when two people snap it.

When a cleaner pays out of their own pocket, say for supplies on the way to a job, the reimbursement statement shows exactly who is owed what. No more "I think I owe you for the gas from last week?" More in snap receipts.

Paying your team

For most cleaning companies, payroll is the biggest cost by far, so it's the number you most need to be right. In More Knocks, pay runs are built from the hours each cleaner actually worked, from their check-in and check-out on each job. Nobody retypes a timesheet. Create the pay stubs and email them to your team in one step.

When a customer tips, the tip is split evenly among the cleaners who worked that job and added to their pay. Your payroll cost shows up in your books as soon as the pay run is done, so your profit for the month already accounts for your crew. More in payroll.

Knowing your profit, job by job and month by month

Profit has two sizes, and you need both. The monthly number tells you if the business is healthy. The job number tells you why.

Your monthly profit is right there in your books: revenue, minus expenses, payroll and card fees. The profit and loss statement and revenue by month show the trend. Then job costing shows what every single clean earned once labour and costs are counted, so you can see which services and job sizes are worth chasing, and which ones only keep the crew busy.

Cash flow: profit you can actually spend

A cleaning company can be profitable and still run out of cash. You pay your crew every week or two. Customers pay when they pay. Supplies come out of the account on Monday. If the money in arrives later than the money out leaves, a good month can still feel tight.

Three habits keep cash flow healthy:

1. Take a deposit at booking. Money arrives before the work, not weeks after it.
2. Charge the balance the day of the clean. Every day a balance sits unpaid is a day you're lending your customer money.
3. Watch the weeks, not just the month. Cash in and out by week shows the tight spots before payday, when you can still do something about them.

More Knocks shows cash in and out by week on the same screen as your profit, so a tight week is something you see on Tuesday, not something you find out on Friday.

What running Clean Papi on it taught us

More Knocks started as the system one Toronto cleaning company, Clean Papi, built to run itself. The money side came from the same hard early days. Nayan underquoted job after job before he could see what a job really cost. Some clients didn't pay. And keeping the business running meant five separate subscriptions at about $40 a month each, for bookings, accounting, crew management, marketing and payments, none of them talking to each other.

Putting the books in the same place as the jobs changed what the owner could see. Every payment arrived with its job attached. Every expense had a receipt behind it. Payroll came from real hours, not memory. Instead of finding out at tax time what the year had been like, the numbers were there every day. That's the version of accounting we wanted to hand to other cleaning companies: one you don't have to do, because it's already done.

The month-end checklist for a cleaning business

Ten minutes at the end of every month, whatever software you use: