Stop doing pay on a spreadsheet

How cleaner pay works today, and where it breaks

In most small cleaning companies, pay day starts on Thursday night with a pen. The owner scrolls back through the week's group chat to work out who was where. Marcus says he finished 21 Elm at 2. The customer says the crew left at 1:30. Aisha covered half of Leo's Wednesday. Somebody bought mop heads with their own money and wants it back.

Employee or contractor? Settle it first

Before anything else about pay, you need to know what your cleaners are, because it decides almost everything that follows: deductions, vacation pay, overtime, who's responsible when something goes wrong.

Plenty of cleaning companies call their cleaners contractors and pay them a flat amount per job. What matters to the Ontario government and the CRA isn't the word in the contract, it's how the work actually happens. The Ontario guide to the Employment Standards Act says someone may be an employee when, among other things:

• they can't subcontract the work to someone else
• the business provides the tools, equipment or supplies
• the business decides the work, the pay, and when and where it's done
• the business can discipline or suspend them

And may be an independent contractor when they can make a profit or lose money on the work, decide how, when and where it's done, and the business can end the contract but not discipline them.

Read that list with a typical cleaning company in mind. You book the customer, set the time, send the address, supply the kit and decide what a deep clean includes. That points one way. Ontario's guide says plainly that employers can't treat employees as if they aren't, and the CRA can rule on a worker's status for CPP and EI if either side asks.

This is the one question in this guide where you should talk to an employment lawyer or an accountant about your own crew. Getting it wrong can mean back pay, back deductions and penalties. The Employment Standards Information Centre (1-800-531-5551) gives general information, though not advice.

What you owe an employee in Ontario

If your cleaners are employees, the Employment Standards Act sets the floor. Here's what matters most for a cleaning company, from the Ontario government's guide, checked October 23, 2026:

Then there are deductions. Employers deduct CPP, EI and income tax from an employee's pay, add the employer's share of CPP and EI, and send it all to the CRA on a schedule, through a payroll account. Most small companies hand that part to a payroll provider or a bookkeeper, and that's sensible: the rates change every January.

Rules like these change. Where something depends on your business, like averaging hours for overtime, or a cleaner who works for you and someone else, check with an accountant or the Information Centre.

Paying for drive time between jobs

This is the one owners most often get wrong, in both directions.

Ontario's guide is clear on the basics. Commuting from home to work isn't work time. But travel between job sites during the workday is. So if Marcus finishes 25 Elm St at 12:15 and drives 35 minutes to his next job, those 35 minutes are paid time, even though no customer is paying for them.

A few cases that come up in cleaning:

• Home to the first job. Usually commuting, not paid. If the cleaner takes your company van home for your convenience, the guide says work time starts when they leave home.
• The office to a job. If cleaners meet at your storage unit to pick up the kit, the drive from there to the first job is travel during the day.
• Between jobs. Work time. Every time.
• The last job to home. Usually commuting again.

Minimum wage is checked over the whole pay period, so a cleaner paid per job can drop below it once their drive time is counted. If you pay a flat rate per clean, add up a heavy week's on-site hours and drive time and divide. If it's under $17.95, you have a problem to fix.

Check-ins measure time on site, from arrival to departure. Agree with your crew how drive time between jobs is counted, write it down, and make sure it ends up in their pay.

Tips: who keeps them, and how to split them

Ontario has specific rules on tips, and they apply whether the tip arrives in cash on the counter or on the card with the balance.

• You can't keep your employees' tips. An employer can't withhold or deduct from them, and a cleaner can't sign that right away.
• You can pool them. Collecting tips and sharing them among employees is allowed, and can be a condition of the job.
• Owners share only if they clean. A sole proprietor, partner, director or shareholder can take part in the pool only if they regularly do substantially the same work as the people sharing it. If you do, the policy has to be posted where employees can see it.
• Credit card fees, partly. On a credit card tip, you can hold back the greater of the card company's fee rate or 1.5%. Not on debit.
• How to pay them. Cash, cheque or direct deposit, including e-transfer, to the employee's own account. There's no set schedule, but an unreasonable delay can count as withholding.

The common way to split a cleaning tip is between the cleaners who did that job. Priya added $20 by card to her deep clean, which Marcus and Aisha did together, so each gets $10. A tip on a solo clean goes to the one cleaner.

Tips are income for the cleaner either way. For CPP and EI, the CRA separates tips the employer controls, like a mandatory service charge, from tips the customer gives directly. A card tip that passes through your account can fall on either side depending on how it's handled, so ask your accountant how yours should be treated.

Paying cleaners back for supplies

Cleaners buy things. A forgotten mop head, a bottle of glass cleaner on the way to a job, parking downtown. The cleaner paid, and they need it back.

The CRA's guide for employers draws a useful line. A reimbursement, where the employee gives you a detailed receipt and you pay back exactly that, generally isn't income for them. An allowance, a flat amount on top of pay with no receipts, generally is taxable, unless it's a reasonable per-kilometre rate for driving. For 2026, that reasonable rate is 73 cents a km for the first 5,000 km.

So the habit that keeps it clean: no receipt, no reimbursement. Pay back the exact amount, keep the receipt, and put it on the cleaner's pay statement as its own line, separate from their wages. Then they can see it, you can claim the HST on it if you're registered, and nobody asks in March whether they were ever paid back.

Cleaner pay in More Knocks

More Knocks takes the part of pay day that eats your evening, the adding up, and does it from data you already have.

Hours from check-ins

Cleaners check in when they arrive at a job and check out when they're done, in the cleaner app. Those times become their timesheet, job by job. Marcus's week is 24 hours over seven jobs, and every line has a start and finish behind it.

A pay run you review, then approve

Each pay run shows the whole crew on one screen: hours, rates, tips and reimbursements. Look it over, approve it, and it's done.

Tips split across the crew

Tips are split across the cleaners on the job and appear on each cleaner's statement, so a card tip doesn't sit in your account waiting for someone to remember.

Reimbursements on the statement

A cleaner photographs a supply receipt with snap receipts. It's read, filed as an expense, and the amount lands on their next pay statement as its own line.

A statement for every cleaner

When you approve the run, each cleaner gets their pay statement by email, with a PDF. Then you pay them however you already do: e-transfer, your bank's direct deposit, or your payroll provider.

To be straight about where the line is: More Knocks does the hours, the pay run and the statements. Source deductions, remittances to the CRA and year-end slips sit with your payroll provider or accountant. If that matters for your company, ask us on the demo call where it stands. Cleaner pay also feeds job costing, so each job's labour is costed from the same hours.

Before you run pay: a checklist

Run through this before every pay day, whatever you pay with: