Quoting a one off job wrong costs you once. Quoting a recurring cleaning contract wrong costs you every week for a year, which is why this is the single most consequential number a cleaning business produces. The arithmetic is not difficult and almost nobody does it in front of the customer, which is where the margin goes.
Hours per visit is the number everything hangs on
Measure it on a real clean rather than estimating from floor area, because the variation between two buildings of the same size is enormous. Then multiply by the loaded hourly cost of the people who will do it, not the wage. On the worked example this site publishes, a loaded technician rate of $58 an hour against 1.3 hours is $75.40 of cost before anything else.
Multiply by the year, not by the visit
A quote that is five dollars light per visit is $260 a year on a weekly contract and considerably more across a portfolio. That is why the quote deserves five minutes of arithmetic rather than a glance at what the last one was. The recurring nature that makes cleaning attractive is the same thing that compounds a bad price.
Supplies, travel and cover are real lines
Consumables, the drive between sites, and the cost of covering somebody who is off all belong in the price. Travel inside the working day is paid time under the Department of Labor position, so a quote that assumes the crew arrives free is understating the cost of every visit in the contract.
Put the terms in the quote
How many visits a month, what happens on holidays, notice to cancel and how price changes work. A quote that names those is a document you can hold somebody to; one that names a monthly figure alone is an invitation to a conversation later. Domestic work agreed in the customer home can also carry cooling off obligations.
A commercial cleaning estimate template, and the three lines it usually leaves blank
Most templates in circulation are built for a one off domestic clean and then used to price a commercial contract, which is where the margin goes. Three lines are usually missing. Supplies and consumables, which on a commercial site are yours and are a weekly cost rather than a one off. Travel, which is a cost per visit multiplied by the number of visits in the year, not a line on the first invoice. And cover, because a commercial client expects the clean to happen when the regular cleaner is ill or on holiday, and somebody has to be paid to do it. Add those three to the sheet before you multiply by the year, and the quote stops being optimistic.
Questions people ask about cleaning quote software
Should we quote per hour or per visit?
Per visit for the customer, worked out from hours behind the scenes. Customers buy an outcome and budget monthly; you need the hours to know whether it pays.
How do we raise prices on existing contracts?
By having said in the original quote how and when it happens. Retrofitting a mechanism is much harder than including one.
Is a walk through necessary?
For anything recurring, yes. The difference between an estimated and a measured hours figure is where the whole margin lives.