Priced the way House Cleaning work is billed
A standard clean and a recurring maintenance clean don't get quoted the same way, so why would every trade? SideWRK prices House Cleaning the way the work is really billed: off a per-service menu (e.g. standard clean $150, deep clean $250). Tap the work, put in the numbers, and the line prices itself — no napkin math, no undercharging a job because you rushed the quote.
What House Cleaning jobs actually run
These are the starting numbers SideWRK loads for common House Cleaning work — researched to be realistic, so you can send an estimate that isn't a guess. Adjust any of them to your market in a tap.
Typical starting prices in the app — your area, your materials, and your reputation move them. You set your own; these just keep you from undercharging on the first quote.
Move-in / move-out, priced out
Numbers only mean something on a real job, so here's how SideWRK builds the ticket on a common one:
That whole $350 is your labor — no parts to front and no markup games, just your time priced like it's worth something.
What moves a House Cleaning price
Two House Cleaning jobs that look the same on paper can be a hundred dollars apart once you're on site. Here's what actually changes the number — the things to size up before you quote:
- Standard vs deep — the first deep clean isn't the recurring maintenance clean and shouldn't be priced like one.
- Size and condition — square footage, the number of bathrooms, and how lived-in the home is all move the number.
- Frequency — weekly and monthly aren't the same per-visit price, because the gap fills back up.
What a House Cleaning job puts on the record
Every trade documents something different, and House Cleaning is no exception. SideWRK captures the beds, baths, and square footage and the rest of what your work needs on the record — the details that protect you and make the invoice stand up:
- the beds, baths, and square footage
- the service plan — weekly, biweekly, monthly
- whether there are pets
- a key and alarm-code confidentiality note
Example note on a job: "Pre-existing stains and wear noted — advised they may not fully clean."
How to price a House Cleaning job in SideWRK
- 1
Start the job and add your work
Open a House Cleaning job and tap a suggestion like "Standard clean" or "Deep clean" — the common work is already loaded, so you tap instead of type.
- 2
Price it off a per-service menu
Enter the numbers and the line prices itself, off a per-service menu (e.g. standard clean $150, deep clean $250). Put parts on at your cost so what you clear is real profit, not just the House Cleaning ticket total.
- 3
Note the details
Add a plain-English note — for example, "Pre-existing stains and wear noted — advised they may not fully clean." — and a photo of the work.
- 4
Log what the job needs
Capture the House Cleaning-specific records: the beds, baths, and square footage, and the service plan — weekly, biweekly, monthly.
- 5
Send it and get paid
Send the House Cleaning estimate for approval. Your customer approves from their phone, the invoice goes out, and you get paid — card or Apple Pay, on the spot.
Staying on the right side of the rules
SideWRK documents your House Cleaning work — it doesn't make you licensed, and it says so plainly. What to know: usually no occupational license — some cities want a business license, and bonding and insurance are worth carrying when you're entering people's homes.
House Cleaning pricing — common questions
How do I price a House Cleaning job in SideWRK?
You bill off a per-service menu (e.g. standard clean $150, deep clean $250). Add the work — Standard clean, Deep clean, Move-in / move-out — enter the numbers, and each line prices itself. Parts go on at your cost, so you see real profit and not just the total.
What does a typical House Cleaning job cost?
It depends on the work, but as a realistic starting point a common job like move-in / move-out runs about $350 in the app. Common House Cleaning work ranges from about $40 to $350. Those are defaults you can change — you always set your own prices.
What does SideWRK document on a House Cleaning job?
The records House Cleaning work actually needs: the beds, baths, and square footage; the service plan — weekly, biweekly, monthly; whether there are pets. They stay on the job as you work, so the paper trail is built instead of reconstructed later, and the disclosures this trade needs print on the estimate and invoice themselves.
Do I need a license to do House Cleaning work?
That depends on your state and the job, but here's the shape of it: usually no occupational license — some cities want a business license, and bonding and insurance are worth carrying when you're entering people's homes. SideWRK documents the work; it doesn't certify you.
Does SideWRK work for trades other than House Cleaning?
Yes — it runs all 42 trades, each priced and documented its own way. If you run more than one, the Multi-Trade plan unlocks them all and switches between them in a tap.
Your first jobs
The menu above settles what to charge. Where the first houses come from is a different problem, and How to Get Your First House Cleaning Clients is this trade's answer to it — the warm-network list, the test clean that buys you a photo worth showing, the realtor introductions, and a hypothetical first ninety days run as a ledger with every dollar billed and kept. Read that one for where the work comes from.
This is the other half: what the app does between "how much?" and the key in your hand. A first-time customer is being asked to let a stranger into an empty house, so the paperwork isn't a formality here. It's most of the answer. The estimate goes out as a document with your business name on it, they open it on their own phone at their own kitchen table, and approving it means typing their name. That typed signature is stored with the date and prints on the estimate and the invoice afterward. Nobody has to remember what was agreed to.
- Let them pick their own add-ons. Mark a chunk of work — inside the oven, the fridge, the interior windows — as an optional add-on and it lands on the approval page as a checkbox, with the running total moving as they tick it. The app's own wording: "Your choice — the total updates as you check or uncheck it." So you quote the whole house once instead of guessing high and losing the job, or guessing low and eating the oven.
- A deposit is a dropdown, not a conversation. Waived, 10%, 25%, 33% or 50%, set on the job or as your shop default, collected on the approval page at the moment they say yes. On a move-out for somebody you've never met, that's the difference between a booked date and a maybe.
Repeat business — the route the app files for you
House cleaning is one of fifteen trades in SideWRK that carry a recurring plan, and on this one it isn't a nice-to-have. Weekly, every two weeks, monthly — that's the line between a job and an income, and it's the only part of this trade the app can genuinely run for you.
Here's the machine, exactly. On the customer, "Set up recurring" opens a form that already knows your trade: it names itself off the first row of your menu, and the same service chips you tap on a job are sitting right there to build the standard visit — tap Standard clean and the $150 lands as a line. You set the cadence (weekly, every two weeks, monthly, or every so many days), the date of the first visit, which home it belongs to, and a note the field prompts for with "Gate code, dogs, where to park…". Before you save, it shows you what one visit totals.
- Then it runs without you. Each morning the app checks which plans have come due and writes the visit itself — a real job, dated for that day, the work already priced on it, its own invoice number, badged Recurring in your job list. You clean the house and send it. Nothing lives in your head, and no Tuesday gets away from you.
- The controls are the honest part. Pause a plan while a customer's away and Resume it when they're back. Start this visit now files the next one early when somebody calls ahead of the calendar. Delete a plan and every visit it already created stays in your jobs — those were real work and real money, and losing the template doesn't erase them.
What this page won't re-argue is whether that $120 recurring row is a discount you're handing over. It isn't — and the case for it, along with what a single house is worth across a year of visits, the moment the second booking is actually won, and what to move when a customer pushes on price, is made in full in the back half of the first-clients guide. It's one story and it's told there.
How house cleaning bills
Every trade in SideWRK carries a pricing model, and this one is the plainest in the app: a flat menu, and a labor share of 1.0. That second number is the whole story. On thirty-six of the 42 trades the app books part of every ticket to materials — parts, film, chemicals, dump fees — and prices your labor around what's left. On six of them it books nothing to materials at all, and house cleaning is one of the six. Your caddy is a business expense. It is not a line on the job.
So there's no parts margin to hide in. Markup isn't available to you here. What a house pays, minus nothing, is what you made, and the only variable left in the whole trade is how long the house took. That makes the useful question about the menu not "is $150 the right price" but how many hours does $150 buy.
The app seeds a new house cleaner at a $50 rate and is straight about what that field is for — Shop labels it "Default labor rate ($/hr) — used only for custom time-based lines," because nothing on the menu is timed. Which makes $50 a checking number rather than a billing one. This is what it checks:
| Menu row | Price | Hours it has to fit in |
|---|---|---|
| Standard clean | $150 | 3 h 00 |
| Deep clean | $250 | 5 h 00 |
| Move-in / move-out | $350 | 7 h 00 |
| Recurring maintenance clean | $120 | 2 h 24 |
| Interior windows | $60 | 1 h 12 |
| Inside oven | $45 | 54 min |
| Inside fridge | $40 | 48 min |
| Laundry / linens | $30 | 36 min |
Eight rows — the app's full tap menu; the list further up carries the six most-quoted. The right column is each price divided by $50: the time the work has to be done in for that rate to hold.
Two tickets, worked all the way down.
Three hours and you made $50 an hour. Four and you made $37.50. Take five — which a house nobody has kept up will take — and you made $30 an hour on work you named a standard clean. Nothing about the cleaning was wrong. The row you tapped was.
Three tapped rows, one ticket, and every dollar of it yours. Five hours works out to $67 an hour. Six is $55.83. Seven is $47.86, under the number the app started you at. Same house, same work — the only thing that moved was the clock.
One more thing that right-hand column shows: the add-ons carry the best hour on the menu. You're already in the house, already parked, already unpacked, so the fifty-four minutes the oven has to fit inside is fifty-four minutes of actual work and none of it travel. Each tap is its own priced line on the same ticket — that's how work goes on a job, and it's why a full house goes out as one estimate and comes back as one approval.
Multiplying jobs
Past the first month, most of what grows a cleaning business is follow-through, and follow-through is what falls off the back of the day by Thursday. These run whether you remember them or not:
- The quiet quote gets a nudge. An estimate nobody answered gets a plain follow-up email at three days and again at seven. Two, then it stops. Most people who meant to say yes just lost the thread.
- You know the moment they open it. When the customer opens the estimate, the app tells you — a push to your phone if notifications are on, an email if it couldn't reach you that way. One or the other, never both; the code's own comment on it is "don't double-ping."
- The unpaid invoice chases itself. A wrapped job with money still owed gets a reminder at three, seven and fourteen days, three at most, carrying a pay link the customer settles by card or Apple Pay. If you'd rather the money came to you another way, a payment request you send yourself is a separate thing you create by hand.
- The finished house asks for the review. Once a job wraps, the app emails the customer a review request on its own, then one reminder a few days later. That's the cap — one ask, one nudge, and it stops whether or not they answer. Nobody gets pestered on your behalf.
- The kitchen you left sells the next one. A photo off a job can be copied into the gallery on your public page, on its own or paired as a before and after. It's a public page and the app says so at the moment you post: "Don't post a customer's face, license plate, house number, address, or name — show the work, not who it's for." In this trade that's not a technicality. Half of what you're selling is that you can be trusted inside somebody's house.
All of it is already running on a sample business in the live house cleaning demo — free, no signup.
Price it now
The calculator for this trade doesn't price off the menu. It prices off the house: square footage times your rate per square foot, then a multiplier for deep or move-out, and another for how often you come. Which makes it the tool for the one question a flat menu can't answer — how big does a house have to get before the flat price stops paying?
Run the numbers it ships with. It opens on a 2,000 sq ft home at $0.13 a square foot, which is $260 for a standard clean. The menu's standard clean is $150. Divide $150 by that same $0.13 and you land on about 1,150 square feet — that's the house the flat price was built for. On a 900 sq ft apartment, $150 works out to $0.167 a foot, near the top of the $0.10–$0.20 band the tool prints as typical. On a 2,000 sq ft house it's $0.075, under the bottom of it.
Neither number is wrong. The menu is a fast, honest starting price for an ordinary house, and it's what the app prefills so your first quote isn't a guess. This is the check you run before you say yes to a big one. Same free calculator the house cleaning page runs, right here (or open the full version):
The paper worth keeping
The records list above says what a house cleaning job captures. This is what each one is actually for, and which parts of it the customer ever lays eyes on:
- The sentence you never have to write. Every estimate and invoice this trade produces carries a line the app prints under the total, on the copy the customer keeps: "Keys, alarm codes, and lockbox access provided by the customer are used only to perform the agreed service and are kept confidential." You are alone in somebody's empty house. That sentence, on their paperwork, in writing, on the day, is the answer to the only question that ever really stood between a stranger and a key — and you didn't have to make the speech.
- The house record is yours; the label is theirs. Beds, baths, square footage, the plan, whether there are pets, and whatever you put in the notes — gate code, the dog, the room they always want skipped — live on the home and stay there. What reaches the printed document is the home's label or its service address, and that's the right split: enough for the customer to see which house they're paying for, without their gate code riding around on a PDF.
- Approved, by name, on a date. When they approve, they type their name. It's stored with the timestamp and prints on the estimate and the invoice from then on. Three months later, "I never said to do the windows" is a question the paper answers instead of a conversation you have to win.
- The license line, stated as a rule. The same printed notice sets out the shape of it: "House cleaning generally requires no occupational license, though some cities require a business license, and bonding/insurance is recommended when entering customer homes." Shop has a Business license # field, marked optional, and whatever you put in it prints on your documents. What the app never does is tell you which of those applies to you — it doesn't know your city, and it isn't going to pretend it does.
- April, already done. Numbered invoices, payments, supply receipts — it all rolls into a year-end wrap-up: rows, category totals, CSVs, and a printable summary a preparer can actually use. On a trade that books nothing to materials, the expense side is where your real margin gets decided, so it's worth the two minutes a receipt takes.
The app's own footer on this, printed on the paperwork with everything else: SideWRK is a documentation tool, not legal advice, and does not determine or guarantee compliance with any licensing, bonding, or insurance requirement. It helps you keep the record. The rules stay your city's, and meeting them stays yours.