Mrs. Smith calls and tells you that she wants to change her cleaning day to Friday. You see that team 2 does have an opening in their schedule for Friday, so you agree to do so . . . without first checking to see what part of town team 2 is working in on Fridays. Low and behold, on Friday the houses they’re cleaning are all the way over on the other side of town – half an hour away from Mrs. Smith!

Inefficient scheduling of client cleanings will have a major negative impact on your overall efficiency. It makes absolutely no sense to fine tune the cleaning skills of your employees and then turn around and lose it all through inefficient scheduling of your clients.

You need to obtain a software program like Microsoft Expedia Streets & Trips. This is very inexpensive (about $40) but it can help you schedule your clients very efficiently. It is essentially the same as the free map service that you can access from Expedia on the Internet, but you can set up the schedule for each team for every day of the week and save it to a file.

You can also create a Master Grid that will show at a glance which teams are where on any given day in the area you’re servicing. When an existing client calls wanting to change her cleaning day, you can immediately see what team, if any, is in her area on the day she is requesting. When a prospective client calls, you can plug her address into the Master Grid and identify (a) where she is located and (b) which day would best fit into your schedule if she becomes a client.

Here is an example of how you can create Grids on your software map to divide the territory up into chunks. Within each block, we placed numbers from 1 to 5, depending on the layout of the area we’ve subdivided. The idea here is to more specifically identify where on the grid existing clients and enquiring callers are located. The next step is to locate your office on the map and identify it with a pushpin.



Helen Johnston calls to inquire about your service. She tells you she lives at 856 Gloucester St. You type her address into FIND ADDRESS. Her location is identified and you can insert a pushpin at her exact location on the map. You enter her name, the address is automatically entered.

You’ll note that Mrs. Johnston is located in Zone B3. Assuming you book Mrs. Johnston for an initial cleaning consultation, you’ll check to see what other clients are already booked in her zone, if any, and on what days. You may also check to see which clients are located in Zones B2, B4 and C1 and what’s available on the schedule for teams working in those zones.

You can print out a map to her home from your office, along with specific written directions. The software tells you that the distance is 5.7 miles and it will take approximately 12 minutes to drive there from your office. This ALSO tells you that for a team to drive to Mrs. Johnston’s home will consume a total of 36 minutes of time – one way – for a team of three people (12 minutes X 3 people = 36 minutes). Another 36 minutes to return to your office. If she was the only client northeast of your office on the day she wants to be cleaned, that would mean over an hour of travel time just to service this one client.

For this reason, use pushpins with a different color for each day of the week to identify existing clients’ locations. Use five different colors and different designs to represent different situations (one type for established clients, another for prospective clients, another for first time cleaning, etc. You can change them instantly when appropriate.




You can quickly check to see what clients are currently being served in Mrs. Johnston’s general area (we’ve used a red pin to mark our prospect, Mrs. Johnston), by which teams and on what days. In this illustration, 5 are being cleaned on Mondays (illustrated with turquoise pins) and 5 on Thursdays (in this case, identified by green pins).

The first time you set up each client you will pinpoint them on the map and enter such information as: frequency of cleaning (weekly or biweekly), the assigned team and the approximate cleaning time. Once the preceding information is entered one time (which takes only about 20 seconds or so per entry), it becomes very easy to develop efficient routing to and between clients. This information will also help you determine whether or not a given team can take on a new client on the day they’re in the general neighborhood.

You select ROUTE from the dropdown menu. Click on “Set Start Point” and either type in “Office” in the “Place” dialogue box or enter your office address in the “Address” dialogue box.

Next you click “SET END POINT” and again enter “Office” in the “PLACE” dialogue box or your office address in the “ADDRESS” dialogue box. The team will start the day at the office and end the day at the office.

Now it’s time to add your clients and create your routing schedule. Click on the ADD STOPS button and add one of the clients to be cleaned that day. You can do this by either entering their name (such as “VonShrink, Mildred”) or enter this client’s address. You’ll find it’s easier to just enter the client’s name.

Click on the client’s name and again select the CLOCK icon. In the STOP FOR box enter the cleaning time allocated to the client. In Vons ink's case we have determined the team will spend 50 minutes cleaning this home

Use the same procedure for each client on this day’s schedule. Once all the day’s client have been entered into the routing schedule, you can click the CALCULATE button. The routing, related travel and cleaning time, and the order in which the clients will be cleaned will be tabulated.

For example, the software will tell you that if the team leaves the office at 8:30 in the morning, they should be back at the office by 2:37 in the afternoon. Total time for the day should be 6 hours and 7 minutes.

Out of our six hour day in our illustration, a total of 42 minutes will be spent on travel time. This represents 11.4% of this work day, which is pretty efficient scheduling. Remember, though, that this is for three people in the vehicle, so actual non-productive time is 126 minutes, or 2 hours and 10 minutes.

The software allows you to switch the order in which the clients are to be cleaned. If you want to see if there’s a more efficient cleaning sequence, you can shift the order in which the clients are cleaned and recalculate the time.

If you do decide to accommodate a client whose request impacts your scheduling efficiency, you should recalculate the alternate cleaning order time and add the difference to the price of the client you’re willing to accommodate. Another 5 minutes of team travel time is another 15 minutes worth of labor you should charge the client (if it’s a three-person team). It’s not only important to stay on top of scheduling to ensure maximum efficiency and time and cost control. It’s important to know them before visiting a prospective client for an initial consultation and price quote.

Because of the information attached to each pushpin, in our example we could see that team one is in her neighborhood on Monday and team two is there on Thursday. When you go to visit Mrs. Johnston tomorrow morning, you know:

That you are already servicing clients in her neighborhood on Monday and Thursday, but Thursday would be the day to clean for her if she chooses to go with your service because team one’s day is already full on Monday.

You do have an opening on Team Two’s Thursday cleaning schedule, so you would be able to schedule her for that day.

All the other Thursday clients for this team are weekly, so you could easily accommodate Mrs. Johnston on either a weekly or biweekly schedule. This would not be so easily accomplished with Team One since they are only in the area every other week.

While it is great to try to be accommodating to clients whenever possible, it’s critically important to fit them into a logical and efficient scheduling and routing pattern. It is all too easy to wind up spending unnecessary hours on team travel in a single week through inefficient scheduling. Inefficient scheduling can indeed be a morale killer for employees who are paid on piecework and a bank-buster for you if you pay by the hour!