Free tool
What one cleaning account really earns per paid hour
Enter the monthly price, the crew hours, the paid drive time and your loaded wage, and see what the account leaves behind before overhead.
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Does tonight's cleaning route fit the shift
Add up the real minutes of a night route, including drive time and the alarm and cart minutes nobody schedules, and see where the shift runs out.
Routes rarely fail because the cleaning takes too long. They fail because the eight minutes at each stop for the alarm, the key ring, wheeling the cart in, taking trash to the dumpster and locking up were never in anyone's estimate. Multiply that by six stops and you have most of an hour that shows up as overtime or as a rushed last building.
This planner adds the three real time costs of a stop and compares the total against the shift you are paying for. Use the drive times your crew actually sees at nine at night, not what a map app shows at noon, and use the honest minutes inside each building rather than the ones you quoted.
Your result
Real minutes per stop
67
The true door to door cost of one building on the route.
Total route minutes
402
Paid minutes the route as drawn will take from unlock to lockup.
Stops the shift actually holds
5
How many buildings fit in the shift at these times, rounded down.
Minutes over the shift
42
Where overtime starts, or where the last building gets shortchanged.
If the overrun is above zero, move a stop to another night or tighten the access minutes before you pay for it in overtime.
The minutes that never make it into a bid
Access and cart handling is the most underestimated line in commercial cleaning. Disarming a panel, signing a badge log, walking a cart from a loading dock to an elevator, hauling two barrels of trash across a lot and then setting the alarm and locking three doors is rarely under six minutes, and in a multi tenant building it can be fifteen.
Put your honest number in the access field and watch what happens to the stops that fit. Most owners discover their six stop route was a five stop route the whole time, and that the sixth building has been getting whatever minutes are left rather than the scope they are paying for.
Fixing an overrun without cutting scope
The first lever is drive time. Reordering stops so the route runs one direction across town, or moving one outlier building to a different night, often removes more minutes than any speed up inside the buildings. The second lever is access: a lock box, a permanent code, or getting a dock key cut usually buys back several minutes per stop for a one time cost.
The third lever is crew size on a specific stop, which is where per property checklists pay off. Two cleaners working a written task list in different zones finish a small office suite much closer to half the time than two cleaners guessing at who does the restrooms.
Questions about this calculator
Should I use clock time or crew hours in the minutes field?
Use clock time, meaning how long the stop occupies the crew from walking in to walking out. This planner is about whether the night fits the shift, so wall clock is the right unit. If you want labor cost instead, use the account profit calculator, which works in paid crew hours.
How do I plan a route with very different building sizes?
Run the planner once per group of similar buildings, or use a weighted average for the working minutes field and check the result against your longest stop. A route with one ninety minute medical suite and four twenty minute suites behaves differently from five average buildings, so plan the big one first and hang the rest around it.
Does paid drive time before the first stop count?
That depends on how you pay. If cleaners clock in at your shop and drive from there, add that leg into the drive minutes field so it lands inside the shift. If they clock in at the first building, leave it out. Either way, be consistent so the overrun figure matches your actual payroll.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
New cleaning account startup checklist
The steps that decide whether a new janitorial or residential account is profitable and stable by day thirty, in the order an owner should work them.
When the result comes out worse than you expected
A bad number on this calculator is usually a routing or scope problem rather than a pricing mistake. On a demo we take the account you just ran, write its property checklist, and slot the stop where it truly falls in the night so you can watch the paid minutes move. You keep the figures either way.