You want to offer your clients the best work possible. You also need to stick to a cleaning budget. Here’s how you can do both.

Running a cleaning or building services business or department is a balancing act. You need to accommodate your customers, of course. But you’re also balancing things like how to best deploy your team, or when to send equipment in for maintenance. One of the most significant factors in this balancing act, however, is your cleaning budget.

Whether you’re part of an in-house team or own a cleaning business, you only have a certain amount of funds to work with. The details may be different as far as the accounting goes and who pays the bills. But in all cases, it’s your job to make the numbers work.

That means you need to consider payroll, supply costs, insurance, and equipment purchases or maintenance. You may also need to factor in company vehicles, gas, office space, marketing, and numerous other expenses.

At the same time, you want to provide the highest caliber work you can. You want your employees to feel happy and appreciated, and you want your customers to feel like they are getting valuable, high-quality service.

How can you manage both, and keep your cleaning budget intact? Like this!

Bid tracking, to-do lists, cleaning checklists, supply inventory, timekeeping… it’s all here. Janitorial manager can help you organize all your commercial cleaning operations. Schedule a free call with Janitorial Manager to learn more.

Don’t make this common budgeting mistake

No matter what’s in your cleaning budget, it ultimately comes down to plusses and minuses. You have money going in, either from invoices or your allotted amount from a board or budget committee. And you have money going out, for any number of reasons.

The key is to work efficiently with the incoming money and carefully watch whatever funds are leaving your account. There are expenses involved in running a business or department. If you want hard-working, long-term employees, you need to pay them well. You have to buy cleaning products. You need the tools and equipment to do your job.

Here’s where we run into a frequent dilemma. When we look at our numbers, payroll is almost always the largest budget item. You need cleaning products, and you can’t do much about their price. Likewise, expenses like insurance, equipment rentals, gas, utilities, and such are set. They aren’t going to change.

When we compare these seemingly fixed costs against payroll, it’s easy to get the impression that payroll is the only reasonable place to cut back. So, when the budget is tight, or we need to cut back, the first thing to go is hours. Sometimes it’s a matter of cutting a few hours from everyone’s schedule. Other times, we think the only way out of a budget crisis is to let people go.

So now we’re down personnel, and yet, our customers still expect the same, high-quality service they pay for. Everyone on the team is working harder, attempting to do more with fewer resources and less time. This leads to burnout, injuries, or people leaving your company for better working conditions.

Of course, it’s easy to see now that this is the beginning of a challenging cycle of hiring too many people, letting people go, work quality suffering, and back to hiring too many people. However, it’s a cycle that almost everyone falls into. But there’s a better way.

Yes, you can stick to a cleaning budget and offer high-quality services

Now let’s look at ways to stick to your cleaning budget, continue to offer excellent service, and not get into a panic about how it’s all going to work.

The very first thing you want to do is get organized. The simple fact is that good organization will help you control your costs, minimize waste, avoid duplicating efforts, help you schedule your team more efficiently, keep track of invoices, maximize your product usage, and so much more.

That’s easy to say, of course. What does it look like in real life? Here are some examples:

Properly diluting products so you aren’t overusing them.
Keeping equipment maintenance so you don’t need to spend extra for a rush repair job.
Tracking supply usage so you can spot possible theft or misuse.
Properly tracking hours so you know if you’re over or under-staffed in any locations.
Ensuring everyone on your team is trained in workplace safety to avoid injuries.
Offering accurate estimates so you know your profit margin for any job you accept.
Working to keep your team happy. Happy employees will stick with you longer, maintain high-quality work, and often lead to happy customers.

The good news is that there’s a tool that helps you with all of this. With Janitorial Manager, you can track your inventory, so you know how much you need, where you need it, and when to order it. You can bid based on the profit margin you want to achieve, and can track your costs for any given location to ensure you stick to your cleaning budget.

With staffing tools like facial recognition for clocking in and out, you never need to worry about over or underpaying your team. And you don’t have to guess at how moving people around will impact your location-based cleaning budget or efficiency. Everything is right in front of you.

Your cleaning budget isn’t there to make your work more challenging. It’s a tool like any other that can help you work more efficiently, meet customer and business needs, and help you plan for the future of your business.

From workloading to maintenance schedules, Janitorial manager can help you organize your entire operation. Schedule a free call with Janitorial Manager and make your work easier and more profitable.