Bookkeeping for cleaning companies.

Why cleaning books fall behind

Most cleaning companies are busy in the evenings and early mornings, which leaves little time for paperwork. The books often slip in three places at once. Contract invoices go out late or at the wrong amount. Receipts for supplies sit in vans and coat pockets. Wages, the biggest cost in most cleaning firms, are paid but never posted properly.

When that happens, the profit figure in your software is wrong. You cannot tell whether a contract covers the hours it takes, whether a client has stopped paying, or how close you are to the VAT threshold. Daily bookkeeping fixes this by dealing with each item while it is still fresh.

Contract invoicing and customer payments

Commercial cleaning is usually billed on a regular contract: an office cleaned five nights a week, a school or a block of flats on a fixed monthly fee. Alongside that come extras. A one-off deep clean, extra hours over a holiday period, a carpet clean or an end-of-tenancy job.

Each of these needs to be invoiced correctly and matched to the money when it arrives. Here is what we do every day:

• Recurring invoices. Where your software raises repeating invoices, we check they have gone out and match each payment to the right one.
• Extras and one-off jobs. Where you tell us about extra work, we check it reaches an invoice rather than being forgotten.
• Part payments. Some clients pay short, pay two months together or pay one invoice twice. We record what actually happened, so the balance each client owes is right.
• Card and app payments. Domestic clients often pay by card or through a booking app. We match the payouts in your bank to the jobs behind them, with any fees recorded as a cost.

Because the bank is reconciled every UK working day, the unpaid invoices list in your software stays accurate. You can see at a glance which clients are late and by how much, and decide when to chase.

Cleaning supplies, equipment and vans

Supplies are a steady, low-value spend. Chemicals, cloths, bin liners, paper towels, hand soap and replacement mop heads add up quickly over a year. Many of these purchases are small card payments, which makes them easy to lose.

We match each purchase in the bank to its receipt or invoice, and follow up the ones that are missing. Where the supplier has charged VAT and you are VAT registered, a proper VAT invoice matters, because it is the evidence for reclaiming the VAT. Our guide on how to organise receipts for your business covers simple ways to get them to us.

Some consumables are bought for a particular client and charged back to them, such as washroom supplies for an office. If you tell us which ones are recharged, we record them so the cost and the matching sale both appear and nothing is left out of the invoice.

Larger items are treated differently. Floor scrubbers, carpet machines, pressure washers and vans may need to be recorded as equipment rather than a day-to-day expense. We record them clearly, with any finance or lease agreement, so your accountant can treat them correctly at year end.

Staff costs, recorded from your payroll

In most cleaning companies, staff costs are the largest figure in the accounts. Running payroll is quoted separately and is not part of the monthly bookkeeping packages. What we do as part of the bookkeeping is record your payroll in the books from the reports your payroll provider produces each pay run.

That means posting gross wages, employer National Insurance and pension contributions as costs, and recording what is owed to HMRC and the pension provider as liabilities. We then match the net pay to the staff payments in the bank, and the PAYE and pension payments to those liabilities. When the books and the payroll agree, any difference stands out quickly.

Minimum wage and travel between sites

Many cleaners are paid by the hour, so pay rates need watching each April. GOV.UK lists these National Minimum Wage and National Living Wage rates from 1 April 2026:

• £12.71 an hour for workers aged 21 and over.
• £10.85 an hour for workers aged 18 to 20.
• £8 an hour for workers under 18, and for apprentices under 19 or in the first year of their apprenticeship.

Travel time matters too. GOV.UK guidance says time spent travelling from one work assignment to another counts as working time for minimum wage purposes. Travel from home to the first assignment generally does not. For a cleaner who works at three sites in an evening, the travel between them needs to be covered by their pay. This is a payroll question rather than a bookkeeping one, but tidy books make it easier to see whether your hourly rates leave room for it.

GOV.UK also says eligible employers can reduce their annual National Insurance bill by up to £10,500 through the Employment Allowance. Whether you qualify is for you and your payroll provider to check. Once it is claimed, we make sure the lower liability shows correctly in the books.

If you use self-employed cleaners rather than employees, we record their invoices as a cost of sales. Whether someone is employed or self-employed for tax depends on how they work, and that is a question for your accountant.

Keeping an eye on the VAT threshold

Plenty of cleaning companies start small and grow contract by contract. GOV.UK says a business must register for VAT once its taxable turnover for the last 12 months goes over £90,000, or if it expects to go over £90,000 in the next 30 days. The test is a rolling 12 months, not your financial year.

Once you are registered, we post every sale and purchase with the VAT treatment you or your accountant have agreed. Our guides explain the UK VAT threshold and the different VAT schemes.

Records you need to keep

GOV.UK says a limited company must keep its records for 6 years from the end of the last company financial year they relate to. A sole trader must keep records for at least 5 years after the 31 January submission deadline of the relevant tax year. Cash basis is now the standard way for sole traders and partnerships without corporate partners to record income and expenses, with traditional accounting available as a choice.

Daily bookkeeping keeps those records in one place: invoices, receipts, payroll reports and bank lines, matched together in your software. See how long to keep business records for more detail.

What is included, and what is quoted separately

Every package covers the same daily work: bookkeeping every UK working day in your existing software, bank reconciliation and receipt matching, finance inbox monitoring, missing invoices and receipts followed up, and a monthly financial summary in plain English.

We work in Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, FreeAgent, Dext, VT Transaction+ and others. You keep your software and your subscription.

Catch-up work, tax returns, payroll, CIS returns, VAT return submission and statutory filings are quoted separately. If your books are behind, start with catch-up bookkeeping so earlier months are complete. If you run your cleaning firm as a company, see bookkeeping for limited companies.