How a Mobile Workforce Management App Can Help Cleaning Companies

If your business is anything like the typical case, cleaning workforce management is one of the more challenging parts of the job. We feel your pain. That’s why we want to show you how adopting a mobile time tracking and attendance app for cleaning companies can make managing your workforce (and your cleaning business) less cumbersome.

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According to a forecast by the International Data Corporation (IDC), the U.S. mobile worker population will grow at a steady rate over the next five years, increasing from 96.2M in 2015 to 105.4M mobile workers in 2020. Cleaning workforce management software has become the new default in the industry, but also an essential aspect of business processes overall, such as admin tasks and understanding where each of your team members is so you can better answer client questions.

Technology is key to successful mobile workforce management

When a cleaning business deploys workforce management software, it enables the business owners to monitor their workforce in the field. Whether you run a residential home cleaning business or have a team of cleaners for janitorial services, managing your workers manually becomes a painful chore.

Having run a commercial cleaning business myself, I cannot emphasize enough the fact that businesses need to have processes and systems in place to manage their teams efficiently. You can easily monitor and track individual employee’s performance when you have a very small team, but things get chaotic as your business begins to scale.

Three of the important features required in a mobile app to manage your workforce include:

• Time tracking: Allows you to understand how long each job is taking
• GPS location monitoring: Allows you to confirm where your people are
• Automatic timesheets: If you pay your team by the hour, you can now pay them for time worked with GPS proof of hours being spent at client locations

A complete solution for mobile workforce management

Hubstaff is one such company that offers a multi-platform solution to monitor your workforce with absolute ease. It has an iPhone and Android mobile app for your team members while they are working in the field, and also comes with web and desktop software that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux for your admin professionals.

Here’s a deeper look at how Hubstaff works:

1. Time tracking

Not all the staff members in a cleaning service are on a fixed monthly payroll. Most likely, there are workers who have hourly pay arrangements with the company. The time tracking feature helps to accurately track the time of employees working on specific customers. You can measure drive time and understand the profits that you are making on each client. Cleaning business owners can easily know when a particular employee started or stopped working on a particular task or client with simple clock in/clock out functionality.

Imagine a scenario where you have a team of three cleaning workers assigned to a client.  When they depart for the client’s home, they start the shift tracker software on the project “Drivetime“, and when they reach the client’s home, they start tracking time to “Client A.”  This provides a better view of the time spent by each individual cleaner at various client homes throughout the day, week, or month and also allows you to confirm they are where they say they are.

An interesting thing about this software is that it runs in the background without interfering with any other phone operations. That means workers can save time and attend to important business (calls from customers, messages, etc.) while their time is being tracked in the background. You get more accurate data without hurting productivity.

2. GPS location tracking

This is one of the most important features as it enables cleaning business owners to accurately monitor the location of their employees in real-time. It helps the owners to know:

• Which route did their team take to get to the work location?
• Were there any unnecessary stops made in-between?
• Were any unwanted detours taken which caused a scheduling delay?

When your company scales and has multiple teams deployed across various client locations at a given time, it becomes hard to monitor their actions throughout the day, let alone oversee them in real-time.

Using Hubstaff’s GPS location tracking as well as geofence time clock, business owners can know accurately what route their teams are taking to reach the client’s location and the driving time involved, thus keeping a check on cleaners who drift away from their work schedule by taking unnecessary detours and stops. Also, if your team has multiple client locations scheduled to visit for the day, it helps to track exactly where they are and whether they’re maintaining their work schedules as planned, thereby helping the owners to save time and optimize their workflows better.

To make managing a mobile workforce even easier, Hubstaff gives you the control to add locations where the time clock should automatically start: Job sites, client locations, or your office. This geofencing feature saves time and ensures accuracy because your team doesn’t have to remember to clock in or out. Hubstaff does it for you when employees arrive at work and leave for the day or to visit another site. Interested in learning more about how these cloud solutions can benefit your business? Read all about it in our guide here.

Or, you can set reminders once you reach a location instead of having time tracking automatically start. Combining this with scheduled shifts, and you’ll get alerts if someone hasn’t shown up or leaves work early. Everything is recorded with more accuracy when hours and locations are both parts of the equation.

Hubstaff is optimized quite well, thus resulting in minimal use of battery power when using the geolocation system.

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3. Automatic payroll

Payroll is one of the most dreaded tasks for business owners as it takes up a lot of time if done manually for each employee of the company. This is especially true if you have staff members who get paid on an hourly basis. This is where Hubstaff comes to the rescue with its automatic payroll feature, which enables the owners to automate this chore to increase efficiency and boost profitability.

Hubstaff automatically takes into account the different hourly rates set for each employee and the number of hours they’ve worked during their pay period or even for those who work on a fixed salary basis. Already using accounting software? Hubstaff takes care of it by easily integrating with third-party payment software like PayPal, Payoneer, Bitwage, and Wise.

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4. Automatic timesheets and reporting

When you need to look into the performance of your team or an individual employee, you can easily access timesheets for each of your team members from the dashboard. There are many pre-configured reports to help you create more visibility. Each report is quite accessible and can be easily exported as a downloadable sheet.

You can also access Work log reports and get to know why team members are late to a particular job site, why they had to log more time today, or why they ran an errand that was not work-related. See how much time each person spends with specific clients or tasks and use that information to optimize schedules and maximize productivity.

5. Powerful integrations

Integrations are like superpowers for any software. If your business already has deployed software for project management, payments & accounting, and so on, you can simply plug them into Hubstaff and enhance the existing workflow of your business. Hubstaff seamlessly integrates with over 30 third-party tools like QuickBooks, PayPal, and Slack.

If you’ve used any apps or systems in your cleaning business or know any specific features that have helped you run the business more efficiently, let us know in the comments section below.

Mike Campion is the author of I’m A Freaking Genius: Why is This Business so Hard and host of the Grow My Cleaning Company Podcast. He spent the last 20 years buying, building and eventually selling his share of multi-million dollar businesses and now helps owners of cleaning companies grow – not to mention, he is a heck of a nice guy! You can get a hold of Mike at www.growmycleaningcompany.com

This post was published March 2016, and updated February 2019.