MaidBossPro Blog — Quotes & Pricing

Moving Cleaning Estimates Off Spreadsheets and Paper

Plenty of cleaning companies run their quoting on a price sheet taped by the phone, a spreadsheet the owner built years ago, and a folder of sent emails. It works, more or less, until the business grows. Then the price sheet is out of date, the spreadsheet only makes sense to one person, and nobody can find the quote from last Thursday. Moving off it does not have to be painful.

Signs It Is Time to Move

Many of the pricing mistakes in Common Maid Service Pricing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them come from quoting on paper and spreadsheets, where every price is typed by hand. Some signs your current setup is holding you back:

• Two people in the office quote different prices for the same home.
• Quotes go out the next day because building them takes too long.
• Approved quotes are re-typed into a calendar, and details get lost.
• Teams arrive without the door code or pet notes from the quote.
• Nobody knows how many quotes are out or which were approved.
• Invoices sometimes do not match what the customer agreed to.

If two or three of these sound familiar, the setup is costing you more than it saves.

Start With the Service List

The first step is not moving every old quote. It is setting up what you sell. In MaidBossPro, estimates are built from your service list, so put your current services and prices in first: recurring cleans at each frequency, the first-time deep clean, one-time deep cleans, move-in / move-out, post-construction, office cleaning, and your add-ons.

This is also a good moment to clean up. Old price sheets often carry services nobody sells and prices nobody remembers setting. Decide how each service is priced, whether flat or tied to bedrooms, bathrooms or square feet, and write it in once. Setting up the list is covered in Building a Cleaning Service List Your Estimates Can Pull From.

Bring Your Clients Across

Your existing customers can come across by CSV import. Export them from your spreadsheet or old system with names, contact details and addresses, and import the file. Imported addresses are placed on the map automatically, so they show up on the office map without anyone dropping pins.

After import, add the cleaning details for your recurring homes: cleaning type, bedrooms, bathrooms, square feet, pets, extras and entry notes. Then add each one on Recurring Cleanings with its fixed day, time and team, so its visits go straight onto the schedule. Once a home has its details, MaidBossPro remembers them, and every future job there fills in from the last one.

Run Side by Side for a Short While

You do not have to switch everything overnight. A sensible plan:

• Week one. Service list set up, clients imported. Send every new quote from MaidBossPro.
• Week two. Use templates for common quotes. Turn on estimate follow-up emails. Put the website request form and sign-up form live.
• Weeks three and four. Recurring clients are on the schedule in their fixed slots; book one-off work from approved estimates and the Waiting List. Stop updating the old spreadsheet.

Keep the old spreadsheet for reference for a while, but stop adding to it. Two systems that both get updated quickly become two systems that both have wrong information.

Get the Office Comfortable

The people who quote every day need to be comfortable with the new way. Sit with each of them while they build their first few estimates. Have them quote a typical home, a deep clean with add-ons and a move-out. Office user roles let you give each person the access they need.

Write a one-page phone script that matches the estimate: address, cleaning type, bedrooms, bathrooms, square feet, pets, frequency, extras, entry. When the questions match the screen, quoting on the call becomes natural.

Do not try to rebuild every old quote. Quotes that were never approved can stay in the old folder. What matters is that every new quote from the day you switch goes through the new system, so within a few weeks everything current lives in one place. History builds up on its own from there.

What Changes Once You Are Moved

Once quoting runs from one place, the rest follows. Estimates go out on the call. Customers approve online. The approved estimate becomes the job, with the cleaning details carried along to the team's phone. Invoices use the same prices. Requests and sign-ups land in Form Responses instead of an inbox.

Most of all, the business stops depending on one person's memory and one person's spreadsheet. For how all of this fits together, visit the house cleaning estimate software page.