Create a House Cleaning Invoice Template for Building Services Effortlessly

House cleaning invoice template for Building services

Ola cleaning family it's your cleaning business Mentor Carolyn Arellano here with some more gems for your cleaning business now when I first started my company one of my main concerns was how to price just as many of you have either gone through the situation or are currently wondering right how do I price am I pricing properly am I under bidding am I overcharging and in this video we're going to get into how to determine what your billable rate should be and the different types of pricing structures so first and foremost I want to get into the aspect of hourly rate right so every cleaning company has an hourly rate or a billable rate per hour meaning how much you're going to be charging per technician to your client now to figure that out let's just get that out the way that's step number one how do we find out what our billable rate is my answer is going to be to do your due diligence and what I mean by that is it's going to take take a little bit of research from you okay this might take you a total of maybe an hour and a half maybe even less if you're tech savvy and are determined to get this done so what I suggest is opening up a Google sheet or if you're old school go ahead and get that pen and paper out and start making a list of cleaning businesses within your area now across every state you know just from talking to cleaning business owners all day long I know that we have different rates so I live in New York I operate out of New Jersey the pricing per hour is pretty similar but it might be very very different for somebody out in Nebraska or Oklahoma or even Hawaii right so be sure to open up that spreadsheeter notebook and write down about 10 to 20 cleaning businesses legitimate cleaning businesses within your area now we want to avoid looking at pricing or getting pricing from quote unquote cleaning ladies right so we cannot compare ourselves number one you guys two cleaning ladies meaning those that do not have an actual company that clean on the side for themselves don't report it to the government and never have any aspirations of scaling their business right so you cannot compare yourself to somebody that is just doing this to get by and pay their bills because they have no vision of scaling this business and that's totally fine if that's how you want to operate then this is you know this video is not for you but if you want to skill your business if you want to grow your business if you want to get out of cleaning right which is the ultimate goal you are going to have to be profitable so do your due diligence call these cleaning companies after you make your list again legitimate cleaning companies some of them might even have online booking forms and if they do you can actually toggle and play around with their pricing but you're still going to want to call in and this is why you want to know what their hourly rate is okay call these cleaning companies and ask questions and here are some of the questions that you should be asking and write this down definitely take notes right also don't worry about having to provide an actual physical address I'm telling you from my own experience not everybody gives me their address when they want to quote or gives the office their address when they want to quote and that's totally fine there are plenty of questions and plenty of things that we can do to decide on how to get a ballpark pricing so don't worry about not giving them an address you can just sell them you don't feel comfortable or you'll provide it you know if you decide to book so you call your first cleaning company and you're going to want to say something along the lines of hey I'm just checking out or I'm inquiring about getting a quote or receiving a quote from you I own a home let's say you want to just start off with homes I want I own a home and I want to know how much it would be for a one-time deep cleaning and they're going to say okay cool one time deep cleaning how many bedrooms how many bathrooms so and this is why you're going to have to call multiple companies right so let's just start off with one bed one bath you can say I have a one bedroom one bathroom home or in our apartment about how much is that going to cost me and they'll give you a ballpark and you could say okay how much is that per hour if you don't mind sharing and they will tell you what their hourly rate is and if they say oh we don't have an hourly rate then you can say okay well how many technicians will be coming to my home and how long should it take them because then you can reverse the math right for example if they say it's going to take one technician two hours this is an example to clean your home and the price is two hundred dollars so then you know that 200 divided by two is a hundred dollars per hour so if they say they don't have an hourly rate you can reverse the math in that sense but you can you know straight up ask well what's your hourly rate do you have a minimum many companies have minimum including myself and we'll talk about that later but do you have a minimum okay how much would it be to add on the inside of the refrigerator how much would it be to add on the inside of the oven how much would it be to add on the exterior of the cabinets you know what if I have pets so you can ask all these questions and get as much information as possible and then you know say okay thank you I'll I'll be giving a call back reaching out call the next company now you're going to ask you know for a two bed two bath what the pricing would be for a deep cleaning the inside of an inside fridge you know you can say what if I have a finished basement how much for the basement you know what if I have pets what if I have two refrigerators because then you can figure out you know how much they're pricing per refrigerator is and whatnot but ultimately what you want to find out is what is the price for these different bedroom and bathroom setups ask about the additionals the pets the windows just all these things that you would be needing to have pricing on and gather that information and then again if they don't want to share that hourly rate with you ask them about how long this cleaning should take with x amount of technicians again because then you can reverse the math I'll tell you what a lot of cleaning companies do this there is no wrong way to go about it this isn't like stealing information this is generally just inquiring for info this is information this is free information so don't feel like you're being like weird or Shady by doing this I know other cleaning companies call me up and try to ask for pricing and honestly if they just straight up to us I would share it with them so it doesn't bother me at all I mean I'm making this video right so the more information that we can give one another the more that we're helping each other there's enough business for everybody but let's get back on track with the pricing so once you call about 10 to 20 different cleaning companies and you figure out that hourly rate you can decide where you feel comfortable with pricing right I would probably add those all up and you know divide it out by however x amount of companies you've called and find a medium like literally add them all up and then divide by how many companies you spoke to and then you can actually find that medium or you can just do comparison you can say okay well these five cleaning companies are charging seventy dollars a man an hour right now and these other five companies were about between 55 to 60 dollars a man hour let's just say and I'm just starting out so I'm going to be a little bit competitive let me price myself out at about 55 on the low end or something of that of that sort but you know starting out you can short Change yourself a little bit I don't want to say completely short Change yourself but I do understand that we all want to get the job experience so we can price ourselves out low when we first started our cleaning business five years ago that's what I did right so I noticed that my big competitors in my area were at sixty dollars a man an hour and this was five years ago and a couple of other competitors they were not as large they were pricing out I think 55 dollars a man hour so I went ahead and started pricing at forty five dollars a man an hour now for me that was profitable because I figured I'm going to be paying my cleaners about anywhere from you know 17 to 20 an hour that leaves me with about 25 five dollars an hour on top of my payroll expenses and then you know I did the math for my supplies and my overhead which wasn't much because we were working out of our home at the time and we were doing the cleaning ourselves so I was like okay you know everything was pure profit in the beginning because we were the ones doing the cleaning my sister and I and putting it back into our business and investing but you still want to be profitable right and maybe you don't want to clean at all maybe you don't intend to clean which is totally fine and you're going to hire right away so do your due diligence come up with that number and be firm with that it has to be sent to you guys it has to be profitable for you so with that being said now you have your billable rate or your hourly rate right as we call it next thing is you're going to want to try to find out how long each clean is going to take you now when we're just beginning it's going to be very hard to figure that out on your own right you can only learn that through experience and I totally suggest writing down every type of clean and exactly how long it took you you can even break it down by room meaning okay you know these bathrooms are taking me typically 45 minutes to an hour so now you know that when you're pricing out a home you should probably go about an hour per bathroom based on your experience and how long it takes you to clean because we all clean differently and at different Paces same thing with the bedrooms the kitchens time yourself doing an inside of a refrigerator and inside of an oven and then you have a kind of idea of how long your cleans will take and I'll actually share some clean times with you guys right now now my clean times are based on including the inside of the windows high dusting and baseboards so my company we only offer deep cleanings we don't really do standards unless it's a recurring client so for a typical deep cleaning of a one bedroom one bathroom no extras that normally takes us about about three man hours again that's like Windows included high dusting baseboards and wet wiping the baseboards so one bed one bath is usually about three man hours a two bed two bath is normally about four man hours a three bed three bath is six man hours a four bed four bath eight man hours and if you can see after the one bed one bath you kind of multiply the amount of bedrooms the bathrooms or actually we add them up and that helps us with our starting point of how long it's going to take to do a deep cleaning okay so that's some math for you guys there so like I was saying like four bed four bath eight man hours five bed five by ten so if you're pricing out a one bedroom one bathroom you know that if you're doing the windows and the baseboards which we include then it's going to take you about three hours to complete with no extras so then you would say Okay three hours of my time and for the sake of math we're just gonna say you decided to charge fifty dollars an hour because that's the going rate in your area so three hours in this home it should be about a hundred and fifty dollars is clean so again we're going to take the amount of time that it's estimated to clean and we're going to multiply it by our billable rate or our hourly rate so with a two bed two bathroom deep cleaning or move out it's for for us it's the same across the board it would typically take four man hours at fifty dollars an hour that's a two hundred dollar job now once we start talking about extras this is where the extra amount of time comes in and again it still kind of breaks down to how long it's going to take your billable rate so for us in larger homes if they have a finished basement we rule of thumb we add on an extra man hour if it's the inside the refrigerator that they're looking to do we add on one man hour if you guys have ever cleaned refrigerators and or freezers you know that taking them apart can be painstaking and really getting them clean can take you know anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half so give your yourself that room the inside of an oven we also quote that at about one man an hour because it can easily take an hour to clean an oven even if you spray it and leave it for a decent amount of time you will have to put in some elbow grease sometimes Now by rule of thumb kitchens usually take about an hour with one person bedrooms or common rooms which are living rooms and dining rooms usually take anywhere at starting at about 30 minutes right because you could be going into an apartment and it's less than 300 square feet but then you can go into a home and somebody's living room can be the size of your apartment if you get what I'm saying so again these are like starting points and another thing that we do when it comes to pricing is we pull up addresses so when we're on the phone with our clients we ask them for the address and 85 percent of the time they have no issue providing that nowadays you can put an address into Google and you can pull up information photos square footage everything on Zillow Redfin or any of those other realtor platforms so while we're on the phone with the client we're actually pulling the house up to verify that the information that they're giving us is correct and the reason why I really love to do this you guys is because homeowners love to leave information out or they love to consider their offices or playrooms actually they don't consider them at all most of the time so what I like to ask is actually a number of different questions and I'm going to get into that just a little bit further into this video because I do want to get back on track with the pricing so with the pricing in a nutshell it all breaks down to how long do you anticipate a clean to take what is your billable rate and are there any extras now we're going to talk about flat rate and hourly billing so I you know I talk to a lot of cleaning business owners from all over the country all over the world actually and we all do things differently and that's totally understandable and respectable what works for me might not work for you what works for you might not work for me and you know that's that goes with everybody pretty much so us personally we charge jobs by the hour so we do our absolute best to gather as much information as possible to quote as accurately as as we can and for the most part I want to say not to toot my own horn but we are pretty freaking close to our clean times when we quote our clients right if for any reason we do need more time it's because something that we didn't anticipate meaning like the dirt level somebody has five dogs the place hasn't had been cleaned in years Etc but outside of that my estimations on clean times are pretty accurate unless there's some outside things going on to make that time cleaning go up so pretty much you know we go through all the questions which we'll be talking about and I have my clean times that I shared with you guys you know a couple minutes back and I will let the client know okay so typically for a home your size and I do use quoting software which I will link down below if you guys are interested to learn a little bit more the quote will pretty much say this is how many man hours your job is going to take so your home is going to take four man hours at 50 an hour and it's going to be 200 so number one we also have a minimum which we'll talk about but our minimum is four hours so we don't come out for any types of jobs for less than four hours your minimum can actually be anything you want to make it could be two hours which means fifty dollars an hour you won't come out for anything less than 100 bucks it could be three hours at fifty dollars an hour for example nothing less than 150 it's totally up to you our minimum right now at the stage of our business is four man hours so if for any reason we show up to go do a job and we quote you for four hours but only takes three right we're still gonna charge you for those four hours because that is just the smallest amount of money that will come out to do and again you can decide on your minimum it can be anything that you feel comfortable with and you can always change that so for another another example let's say we quote a client six man hours for their job and it only takes five well they only get charged with five if it takes five and a half then they only get charged five and a half but we never charge them more than what it actually takes aside from our minimum of four hours so it can work in the favor of the client sometimes also because I'll be like hey it's a six hour job it was only five you're only going to get charged with five man hours so that's one way that you can price your client that you can let them know like look this is what it should take for a home your size if we get there and we realize that more time is needed you know we'll call you right away if we figure that we need more time during the clean because things do happen right a house might look spectacularly clean and then you get into that one bathroom and it's like holy hell right or you get into that one bedroom where you have to like literally scrub everything or maybe like I said there might be pet dander who knows so what we say is this is the estimated amount of hours if for any reason when we first arrive we'll let you know immediately but if we do learn later on in the clean that we're going to need more time then we will give you a call one hour prior to the clean time ending meaning if we quoted you for four hours and we started at 9 00 a.m we're going to give you a call at 12 p.m one hour before your clean time is going to come to an end that we agreed upon and I'll let you know so we'll have someone from the office give a call and say hey Miss Arellano so the teams at your house they have an hour left that was quoted however they did let me know that they are going to need an additional 30 minutes to an hour to complete the first floor now do you approve that time if they don't improve the time which for the most part everybody's like yeah yeah please go ahead take extra time I know not a problem but if they don't improve the time then you can say okay not a problem what would you like my team to focus on within the next 60 Minutes would you like us to just work on the kitchen do you want us leave the bedrooms alone and they will tell you they'll say you know what actually just have them do the kitchen forget the bedrooms blah blah blah and they'll be fine with that now the reason why we started the price like that was because in the very beginning we didn't know our clean times we weren't accurate you know we didn't have the experience honestly so we were losing a lot of money I would go ahead and quote a job let's just say 250 dollars thinking that my sister and myself could complete it in you know two and a half hours together and then we'd spend a whole eight hours in a home so that really started to cut into our profits and I soon realized you know this is not for us so we do charge by the hour with a four hour minimum and we have plenty of clients we are doing just fine now if you are uncomfortable with that method you can certainly quote a flat rate when doing so you don't give yourself the room for charging more so if you say this clean is going to take in your head four man hours and you quote the customer 200 flat rate for the job you're quoting it at 200 because you know that you're anticipating four hours of fifty dollars and it takes five hours you're not going to get paid for that fifth hour which might not be that bad right okay one hour not so bad but now if that clean is a clean from hell it can turn into a situation where you're not even profiting or not even breaking even but you can do very well like that I know plenty of cleaning business owners that do quote flat rates and they are spot on with their timing or if they do take a little bit of a loss it's nothing major but yeah so you can quote flat rates but just do know that at the the end of the day any type of quoting for cleaning does come down to how long is it going to take and how much am I charging per hour that is how you quote cleaning jobs in residential again we are in the state of New Jersey right now we charge sixty dollars a man hour per person some of you might be like oh my God that's so much money and a lot of you are going to be like oh my God you're not charging enough I know this because I talk to a lot of cleaning business owners that are at 75 or 80 amen hour personally in my area I just cannot price that high I will go out of business so I am comfortable right now at charging 60 a man an hour per person for my jobs again we play our cleaners very well we use you know the best equipment if you saw our stuff we use nameband products everybody's background checked we're definitely worth you know the sixty dollars we're probably we're even worth the 75 but I'm just not comfortable pricing that much just yet for my area so again you guys it's always going to break down to how long do I think this is going to take how much am I charging per hour and then how am I going to present this to my client you can do flat rate you can do hourly rate try what works for you again I don't get a lot of pushback from my clients because I say this is my policy it is you know a house your size usually takes this long normally if it takes anything longer it's going to cost more do you agree yes or no I have them sign off I take their deposit and we go about our merry way and hopefully don't run into any issues such as you know additional clean times and stuff like that but people do understand you know you might not be able to see someone's home you know we don't do in-person walk-throughs we literally gather as much information as possible and I'm actually going to get into that right now so I can kind of wrap this video up so let's talk about questions that you should be asking your residential clients while you're on the phone so I've came up with a list of questions because you know I learned from my mistakes like shoot I didn't ask that I didn't ask if they wanted a basement included I didn't ask if they had any additional offices that they didn't include when talking about bedrooms so I started to implement these questions for anyone that answers the phone for us pretty much I feel like the more that you know going into a clean the more information that you have the better right because you're going to be able to quote more precisely so on the phone I always say you know or have someone say hi thank you for calling Spotless Cleaning Service how can we help you today and you just like oh I'm looking for a deep clean or a move-in move out clean or a post-construction clean and I get that info so I always ask can we please have your first name and last name can you please provide us with an email address so that we can send your quotation to that's also another way to Market to them later on but that's not what we're talking about what is the home's physical address right that's like my fourth question because immediately we're pulling it up on Zolo or on Redfin what type of cleaning are you looking to be quoted on right and this is so important because our clients don't know what type of clean they're looking for because they don't have a cleaning business so a deep clean for them might mean to move in move out or it might mean post-construction which by the way before I forgot so we're at sixty dollars a man hour for deep cleaning move-in move out cleaning regular type of cleaning post construction cleaning we charge seventy dollars a man an hour so we're only ten dollars more for post construction because it is very tedious and you have to have the right equipment so what type of cleaning are you looking for is it deep cleaning post construction move in move out commercial cleaning carpets air ducts you know whatever services that you guys provide be sure to reiterate the types of clean to them because they might not know what they need and then you want to ask do you currently reside in the home if no this is considered a move-in move out or post-construction cleaning it's really important to ask that question because again people don't know that they need a move in or move out clean or a post-construction clean so if somebody's not living there that's going to give you the green light that it's somebody moving in moving out and or they might have had just Construction done and they're moving in or moving out then we ask have you recently had any Renovations or Construction done in the home within the last two months if yes ask if there has any post-construction dust left over because people again love to leave out the details so that they get some kind of deal right it's Shady but it happens and you need to just ask the right question so make it clear that if you arrive and there is post-construction dust the hourly rate will change because they'll say oh yeah we did have Construction done but it was three months ago and it's it's really clean and then you get there and there's still a layer of of dust from the construction so let that be known while you're on the phone how many bedrooms do you have how many offices do you have because again people don't like to consider those how many bathrooms do you have would you like to include the inside of the oven would you like to include the inside of the refrigerator would you like to include the outside of the cabinets now I asked that question because that's an extra in our cleaning and that's an extra because we've you know had situations where it could take an hour sometimes to clean outside of someone's cabinets not everybody takes care of their kitchens like you do or I so you know do you want to include the outside of the cabinet do you want to include the top of the cabinets if there is that space do you have any pets do you have a finished basement that you would like to include now these are all very important because these items will add more time onto the clean right so if it's a post-construction clean you know you're going to charge more you might find out that they have offices that they didn't include and that when they gave you the bedroom number some people might think that the inside of the oven and refrigerator is included and it's not those are extras you want to ask about up the front and the top of the kitchen cabinets because people might assume that that is included and it's not do you have any pets pet dander and hair will cause the clean time to increase and the more pets that they have the longer it's going to take to clean up that hair believe me okay and of course you have a finished basement that you would like to include if it's a home because you don't know people might just assume oh well you you quoted me for the whole house cleaning like you have to do the basement and you want to avoid any type of conflict so I always ask these questions or have somebody from my office ask these questions because it makes the client accountable because they're giving you the answers to these questions and it helps you understand better what to expect I also you know I always ask for the physical address because I do love to pull it up on Zillow like I explained to you guys just because people will leave information out they'll tell you it's three bedrooms but it's four they'll tell you it's four bathrooms but but it pops up seven and then that's when you can say oh hi you know I have a question so I just pulled it up on the end internet and it actually says that you have five bathrooms not three do you know why that is and they might have a valid explanation they might say well this home was converted into two apartments so the basement which you're not going to be cleaning has x amount of bedrooms and bathrooms and you can say okay thank you so much for the clarification you know you don't want to make the client feel like they're lying or they're wrong but you can ask politely why the information they're giving you and the information on the internet is not matching up so I'm really hoping that this was very useful or helpful for you guys when it comes to pricing out some of your cleanings now again you might start off with your hourly rate or available rate a little bit lower in the beginning because you want to take the experience and you want to learn the queens and that is completely fine it's something that we did but eventually you're going to have to increase to be able to be profitable and scale your business and you can do that it's okay people raise their prices all the time I mean it just happens and you know I have a whole nother video on that and how to approach that situation should it happen but if you guys are interested in receiving some of the checklists for these types of cleanings which we provide which are deep clean move in move out post construction make sure to click the link Down Below in this video I'll have it in the description you guys can shoot me over your email address on the link down below and I'll help provide or I will provide you with the different checklists that we have and just know that when you do see these checklists you should also be sharing these with your clients right that when we quote we share the checklist because I never want a client to tell me that they thought their walls were included when they weren't or the garage was included when it's not so in the checklist that I'll be providing it'll actually have a breakdown of what's included per type of clean for each and every room it also doubles as a checklist for yourself and your team so I put it in order so the checklist is an actual order of which you and your team should clean to be efficient and effective so you can provide these to your clients so they know what to expect and what's extra and you can provide these to your employees to tell them this is what has to get cleaned and in exactly this order because it makes sense so I hope this video was super helpful for you guys in regards to residential cleaning pricing I will be dropping another video All About commercial cleaning and how to price so make sure to hit like subscribe and you know give me a follow I'm here for you guys this is Carolyn Arellano your cleaning business mentor [Music] [Music]