How cleaners should invoice: a practical guide

Monthly in arrears for recurring contracts, on completion for one-offs. Invoicing each individual visit generates forty documents a month and gets you paid no faster. Itemise labour and materials separately, put a real due date on it rather than "on receipt", and send it as a PDF the client can forward to whoever actually pays. For cleaners, the detail that matters most: recurring work invoiced monthly in arrears beats invoicing each visit — fewer documents, faster payment.

How to price the work

Recurring domestic work is priced per visit and invoiced monthly in arrears. One-off deep cleans and end-of-tenancy are fixed quotes.

What the lines should look like

For a recurring weekly contract, a line that reads well is:

Weekly domestic clean, 4 visits, September

Specific enough that the person approving payment — often not the person who hired you — can see what they are paying for. Here is the same job as a finished invoice line:

Weekly domestic clean — September
4 visits (2, 9, 16, 23 September), 3 hours each, products supplied — £360.00

Deposits

None for recurring work. End-of-tenancy cleans sometimes take 50% because the customer is moving out and harder to reach afterwards.

Materials and markup

Whether you supply products or use the client's should be settled at quote stage. If you supply, fold it into the visit price rather than listing consumables — nobody wants a line item for bleach.

The mistake cleaners make most

Recurring work invoiced monthly in arrears beats invoicing each visit — fewer documents, faster payment.

Missed visits and access. If the client was out and you could not get in, the policy on charging must be in the terms before it happens, not invented in the moment. Most cleaners charge in full for a visit they attended and could not complete, and that is defensible only if it was agreed.

Access and missed visits

You turned up, nobody was in, you could not get the key. Whether that visit is chargeable must be settled in the terms before it happens — most cleaners charge in full for an attended visit they could not complete, and that is entirely defensible as a written term and entirely indefensible as an invoice-day surprise. One clause, agreed at the start, removes the most common argument in the trade.

Getting paid, in this trade specifically

Domestic recurring customers are reliable; commercial contracts pay on their own cycle and often need a purchase-order number you were never told about. Ask at the first site visit whether invoices need a PO, and put it on every one.

The rest is the same for everyone: what has to be on the document, how to number it, how to chase it and how long to keep it. If you are registered for tax, the rate and the label depend on your country.

EstimateBill tracks what is unpaid, reminds you on the due date, and writes the follow-up message for you in three tones. See how the reminders work.