MaidBossPro Blog — Quotes & Pricing

Cleaning Details on the Estimate: How They Carry Onto the Job

A cleaning quote holds more useful information than almost anything else in the business. Whoever built it learned the size of the house, the pets, the extras the customer wants, the lockbox location and the room the customer does not want touched. The question is whether any of it reaches the team that shows up to clean.

The Hand-Off Problem

Whether the details came from a phone call or a visit, as compared in In-Home Walkthrough or Remote Quote: When to See the House Before You Price It, they are only useful if they survive the trip from the quote to the house.

In a lot of cleaning companies, they do not. The quote lives in an email. The schedule lives in a calendar. The team gets an address and a time by text. The lockbox code is in someone's notes app. On the first visit the team calls the office to ask how to get in, finds a dog nobody mentioned, and skips the inside of the fridge the customer paid for. None of that is the team's fault. The information just never made it.

What Goes on the Estimate

In MaidBossPro, the estimate holds the cleaning details, not just the prices:

• Cleaning type: Standard Clean, Deep Clean, Move-In / Move-Out, Post-Construction, Recurring Maintenance or Office / Commercial.
• Bedrooms, bathrooms and square feet.
• Pets.
• Extras: Inside Oven, Inside Fridge, Interior Windows, Baseboards, Inside Cabinets, Blinds, Laundry, Change Linens, Dishes, Walls & Doors.
• Entry & notes: lockbox, key or door code, alarm, rooms to skip, products to use.

These are entered once, while the quote is being built.

What Happens When the Customer Approves

When the customer approves the estimate online, the approved estimate becomes the job, and the cleaning details carry onto it. Nobody copies the bedroom count into a scheduling screen or re-types the door code into a text to the team. The job simply has everything the estimate had.

From there the job goes on a team's day like any other. The steps from approval to the schedule are covered in From Approved Cleaning Estimate to Scheduled Job.

Where the Details Show Up

The cleaning details are shown under the address everywhere the job appears:

• On the office lists. The Scheduled List and the Waiting List of one-off jobs still to book show the details under each address, so the office can see at a glance which jobs are big deep cleans and which are quick recurring visits when building a team's day.
• On the team's phone. Each job card in the team app shows something like “Recurring Maintenance · 3 bed / 2 bath · 1,800 sq ft · Dog” with “+ Change Linens” and the entry notes underneath.

The team reads the card in the driveway, knows how to get in, knows about the dog, and knows which extras are on today's visit.

Write Notes for the Person Who Was Not on the Call

Because the details will be read by a team member who never spoke to the customer, write them for that person. Good notes are short and specific:

• “Lockbox on side door, code 4471. Alarm panel by the garage door, code in notes.”
• “Skip the home office, door stays closed.”
• “Use customer's own wood cleaner on the dining table, under the sink.”
• “Dog is friendly but jumps. Cat stays in the back bedroom.”

Vague notes like “be careful with the floors” are less helpful than “hardwood throughout, no wet mop, use the customer's floor cleaner.”

It also helps to agree as an office on how notes are written. Put the entry instructions first, pets second, and anything to avoid third. When every home's notes follow the same order, a team member reading their fifth card of the day finds what they need in the same place every time. Short, consistent notes are read. Long, rambling ones get skimmed, and the important line gets missed.

The same goes for extras. If the customer wants the inside of the fridge done every visit, make sure it is on the job as an extra, not buried in a sentence in the notes. Extras show on their own line on the team's card, which is much harder to overlook.

The Next Visit, and the One After

The details do not disappear after the first clean. MaidBossPro remembers each home: a new job at a home the company has cleaned before fills in from that home's last job, including beds, baths, pets, extras and entry code, with a note saying so. When a recurring cleaning is added, the home's details are copied onto every scheduled visit in the series. If something changes, such as a new alarm code or a new pet, update it on the job, and new jobs at that home start from the updated version.

For how this fits with online approval, templates and follow-ups, visit the house cleaning estimate software page.