Create Your House Cleaning Invoice for R&D Effortlessly

House cleaning invoice for R&D

How do I make a price list for my cleaning business? Excellent question and we're going to talk about that today. Hi there. I'm Angela Brown and this is Ask a House Cleaner. This is a show where you get to ask a house cleaning question, and I get to help you find an answer. Now if you have a question, you can go over to AskaHouseCleaner.com and there's a little blue button right there in the right-hand corner. You can click on that button and you can just record your message and it sends it to me right here to the show. Yay! Or you can send me an email, if you'd rather, Angela@AskaHouseCleaner.com All right, on to today's show which is from a house cleaner who's just starting a house cleaning business, and she wants to know: Tanzania: Hi Angela. This is Tanzania, and I'm just starting a cleaning service called Clearly Clean in Massachusetts, and I want to know how would I go about doing price lists and making a price list. Any help that you could give would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. Angela Brown: All righty, how do you create a price list for your business? What it's going to come down to is a variety of factors. The variety of factors is where do you live and what is the going rate. The third thing to think about is what kind of services do you offer, because you need to be crystal clear about what services you provide before you create a price sheet. If you offer cleaning the inside of a refrigerator, that needs to have a price because somebody somewhere down the road will ask you, "Can you also clean out my refrigerator?" so that needs to have a price. Do you clean windows? Lots of house cleaning companies do not for insurance reasons. And if you don't see yourself on a two-story ladder on the outside of a house, or you don't have long wands and all the things that you need in order to clean windows, you may decide that's not part of your house cleaning business. But if you do clean windows, where do you draw the line? You clean the insides of windows that you can reach. Some house cleaning companies do, and then there's a flat fee for that. So what do you charge? It's not a flat rate across the board. It's not standard in the industry. Every cleaning company offers different services, and every cleaning company charges different prices. So it's really chaotic and it's difficult to determine, but there are lots of pieces of software now that are on the market. And I'm going to put links in the show notes to some of my favorites so you can take a look at the pros and cons and do a comparison, and find out which one is best for you. Here's how it works. You buy a piece of software. The software, it's usually called a SAAS which is Software As A Service, and you pay a monthly fee for this to be back-ended onto your website. This is a beautiful thing. When I started my house cleaning business, this did not exist. It exists now and it makes the house cleaning bidding process so easy. I mean, it literally will save years off of your life. Okay, so here's how it works. You buy a theme and then you buy this back-end piece of software for your website, so your website is all beautiful. It's very professional and a customer who is searching for you can came onto your website and they can look at the different services that you provide, and just like a shopping cart they can click on those things. Like I have 55 windows in my house and I would like these 55 windows cleaned. You may charge, let's say, $5 per window. So they add the 55 windows in and it adds them up a total, and they can look at that and say, "Oh wow, that's so much money. I'm not prepared to pay that much money. I'll only have 30 windows cleaned and I'll save the ones upstairs for another time." So they can adjust the pricing on their own before you get there, and you try to adjust the pricing into a bid estimate. There are other things that you may want to consider like cleaning out the inside of an oven. Is that part of your regular cleaning or is that part of an up-sell? Most house cleaning companies do not provide this service. That is not a maintenance clean. That falls into deep cleaning. Are you talking about deep cleaning or are you talking about maintenance clean, and if you have this on your website, your customer can decide. "Well, I would like a maintenance clean but I would like this one feature where I would like to have the inside of my oven also cleaned." What that does, as they add that on there, it adds on a time so you can assign a time and a price to every single different element that you offer in your cleaning service. The reason this is beautiful is because if a customer wants a regular maintenance clean, and it normally takes you 2 1/2 hours, then they want their oven cleaned and that takes you 45 minutes, you can now add that extra time into your schedule so that when you show up at the customer's house, you have allotted the proper amount of time for that particular job. Now, if you are solo and you don't have a team of people, what you may want to do is you may want to schedule it where you do the regular maintenance clean, and then next time you come you do the inside of the oven and you schedule a longer period of time. But billing that all right there on the website allows you then to see about how long it's going to take, and about how much money it's supposed to cost. So you get to decide the pricing, and you can actually play around with it a little bit. So let's say that you, for a bathroom, may charge a particular fee, let's say $35 or whatever it is. And then you don't have any takers. You can adjust your pricing and say well, maybe it was only worth $30 for the small powder bathroom, not $35. So if you don't have any takers and people are taking that off going, "Whoa, that's way too much money to pay for that room," what they may decide is it's not in their budget and you may decide you want to alter your pricing. So after a couple months, you can kind of figure out what the going rate is in your area for each different particular element that you offer. So how do you bid and price your services? It's really going to come down to the area that you live in and the services that you provide. That's really what it's all about. But like I said, technology has caught up with us, and it now allows you to have a piece of software that will do most of the heavy lifting for you. So check out the options that we have, and there are a lot of new products that are coming on the market that are new bidding estimate calculators. And if you offer a bidding estimate calculator and I don't know about it, we need to have a conversation. So contact me, Angela@AskaHouseCleaner.com. Let me know about the software that you provide, and we will add that to My Cleaning Connection in our resources connection so that the different house cleaners that are in our network can find out about you. All righty, that's my two cents for today. Until we meet again, leave the world a cleaner place than when you found it.