Built for the realities of Cleaning Companies.

The rota is the business

A cleaning company with fifteen cleaners is not running fifteen jobs. It is running forty or more shifts a week across a couple of dozen client sites, most of them recurring, many of them outside office hours, each with its own specification and its own key arrangement. That is more moving parts per worker than any other trade, and it is why the cleaning rota is usually the single largest unpaid job the owner does.

One honest limit, and it is the reason commercial cleaning starts with a conversation rather than a signature. The shortest recurring interval the platform holds today is a month, so a five nights a week office contract and a fortnightly communal block are not yet set up once and left to repeat. Every site, every shift and every record still sits on one rota, and we walk you through exactly how your patterns would be built before you sign anything.

The records follow the same logic. Jobs, notes, photographs and signatures are held against the site and the client, so when a facilities manager asks what was done on the twelfth you answer from a search rather than from memory.

The six in the morning phone call

Every cleaning owner knows this call. One cleaner is ill, and because the work is recurring and the sites are contracted, that single absence pulls on three client relationships before nine. The usual answer is a frantic round of messages, and the usual result is that the owner covers it themselves.

When a shift breaks, it is offered to the cleaners who can cover it and the first to accept takes it. The owner finds out that the shift is covered instead of finding out that it is not. That is the difference between a morning spent on the phone and a morning spent on the business.

One honest limit while we are here. Clock in and clock out at site is built but switched off, because the notice and consent side of recording where a worker is deserves to be finished properly before it is sold. Cleaners accept and complete jobs in the app, which gives you the record of the visit. We will tell you when the timing side goes live, rather than before.

Who gets the good contract

This is the most sensitive question in a cleaning business and almost nobody names it out loud. The early morning city centre office and the late night restaurant deep clean are not the same job, and the people doing them know exactly which is which. When allocation feels arbitrary, cleaners leave, and replacing a cleaner who knows a site costs more than the shift ever paid.

Work is distributed across the team rather than handed out by whoever is nearest to the phone, and you keep the final say on every assignment. What changes is not who decides. It is that the pattern becomes visible to everyone, so the conversation stops being about favourites and starts being about availability and skill.

Continuity still matters and the system respects it. Regular sites keep their regular cleaners, which is what the client is actually buying. Fairness applies to the work that moves, not to the relationships that should not.

What the client sees

Commercial cleaning is bought on trust and renewed on evidence, and most firms have plenty of the first and none of the second. When a contract comes up, the conversation is a feeling rather than a record.

The customer portal gives a client their own visit history and job records for their own sites. At renewal you are not defending a feeling, you are opening a page. That is usually the moment a cleaning firm stops competing purely on price.

One flat price

OptiTech Automation starts at £199 a month plus a one-off £129 on the Start-up Stage, covering up to five cleaners. Standard is £599 a month plus a one-off £249 for up to fifteen, and Growth is £1,749 a month plus a one-off £999 for up to thirty. Flat within your stage, and never a charge per cleaner. That matters more in cleaning than anywhere, because cleaning carries more workers per pound of revenue than any other trade on this site, and a per user price punishes you for the shape of your own business.

There is no contract. Cancel any month with 30 days notice and take your data with you as CSV.

TUPE, COSHH and what a rota actually proves

When a cleaning contract changes hands, the staff usually go with it. TUPE, the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) rules, applies to a contract moving from one cleaning provider to another, with the outgoing and incoming employer both required to follow the same regulations, consult with affected staff, and carry the workforce across on their existing terms rather than starting again from nothing. For a firm that wins or loses a site this way, the practical question is what happens to the rota on day one. Transferred cleaners need to land on shifts and sites they already know, not be re-onboarded as if they had never worked there. Because OptiTech Automation holds every site, shift and cleaner on one rota, a transferred team can be placed against their existing sites straight away, keeping the continuity a client is paying for. The legal side, notice, consultation, terms, still sits with you and, where needed, an adviser.

Cleaning runs on hazardous substances more than most trades notice, and COSHH treats them accordingly. HSE guidance requires an employer to assess the risks from any hazardous substance used at work, cleaning chemicals included wherever they carry a hazard symbol as a liquid, fume, dust, vapour or mist, to control exposure to them, and to give staff the information, instruction and training that goes with those controls. Once a business has five or more employees, that risk assessment must be recorded in writing. None of that record lives in a booking platform, and OptiTech Automation does not run your COSHH register. What it does hold is the job itself, the site, the date, the cleaner who attended and any note or photograph left against that visit, so if a client or an inspector asks what happened at a site on a given day, the job history answers it alongside your own COSHH paperwork, not instead of it.

A cleaning contract nearly always specifies a frequency, five nights a week, twice a fortnight, and the industry's own professional body, BICSc, publishes Outcome Criteria for judging whether a clean meets an acceptable standard and Compound Productivity Rates for working out how long a cleaning operation should reasonably take. Neither document does the work. What turns a frequency written into a contract into a frequency actually delivered is the rota behind it, who is on which site, on which night, and what happens the morning someone cannot get there. Every site and shift sitting on one rota is what lets a broken shift be offered out and covered before the client notices, rather than after. When a facilities manager asks whether the contracted frequency was met last month, the visit history against that site is the honest answer, built from jobs actually completed rather than a schedule that was only ever a plan on paper.

Who this is not for

An honest note. If you clean two or three houses a week on your own, this is too much machine for the job and a paper diary will serve you better. The monthly bill is carried by shifts that stay covered and a rota you stop building by hand, and that arithmetic needs a team to work.

It is also not a workforce management suite. If you need timesheet driven payroll, biometric attendance or auditable time recording as a contractual requirement of your contracts, that is not what is live today, and you should know that before you sign rather than discover it after. A shift is also offered to one cleaner rather than to a team, so a four person deep clean is set up as four jobs on the same site. OptiTech Automation is built for cleaning firms running recurring contracts and a team: five cleaners and up, or a growing agency taking on its first supervisor.