MaidBossPro Blog — Recurring Cleanings

Holiday Weeks on a Recurring Cleaning Schedule

Holiday weeks are strange for a cleaning company. Everyone wants the house spotless before family arrives, nobody wants a team in the house on the day itself, and your own teams want time off too. A recurring schedule that runs smoothly the rest of the year can get tangled fast in late November and December if you do not plan for it.

Plan Before the Week Arrives

Reminders, covered in Reminder Texts and Emails for Recurring Cleaning Clients, will tell clients about their new dates once you move them. The planning has to happen first.

A few weeks before each holiday, decide:

• Which days you are closed. Thanksgiving Day? The day after? Christmas Eve? New Year's Day?
• Which teams are working. Holiday vacations mean fewer people. Know your capacity before you start moving clients.
• Earlier or later. For each closed day, will those clients move earlier in the week or later?

For holidays like Thanksgiving, most clients prefer earlier. They want the house clean before guests, not after. For the week after New Year's, later is often fine.

Moving the Cleanings

In MaidBossPro, every recurring client has a fixed slot, and their visits are already on the schedule months ahead. That makes holiday planning easy to see: open the holiday week on the Scheduled List and every visit that lands on a closed day is right there. Move each of those single visits to a day you are open.

Filter the dispatch board by team to see each team's holiday week. Clients who normally get Thursday move to Tuesday or Wednesday. Weekly clients may need to move a day or two. Auto-route each day, Closest First or Furthest First from the office, so the reshuffled days still make sense on the map.

The Slot Stays Put

Here is the nice part about fixed slots. Moving one visit does not move the series. If an every-two-weeks Thursday client is cleaned on Tuesday of Thanksgiving week, that one visit moves and nothing else does. Their next visit is still on Thursday, two weeks after the Thursday they would have had, at the same time with the same team. Nobody has to remember to put them back.

Moving a visit later works the same way. Just be aware that pushing later stretches the gap, so a weekly client pushed from Thursday to the next Monday has gone eleven days, and then gets only three days before their regular Thursday. That is usually fine once, but tell them.

Do not use Change on the series for a holiday. Change applies to every upcoming visit, so changing the day for one week would move the client for good.

Tell Clients Early

Clients plan their holidays too. Send recurring clients a short email a week or two ahead with your holiday schedule:

“We're closed Thursday and Friday for Thanksgiving. If you're normally a Thursday or Friday client, we'll be there earlier that week. Watch for your reminder with the new day.”

Then, once each cleaning is moved, the client's usual night-before reminder goes out for the new date. Clients who want to change something reply through two-way texting.

Extra Holiday Cleanings

Holidays are also a chance to sell. Monthly and every-two-weeks clients often want an extra cleaning right before guests arrive, and some want a cleanup after. A few ways to handle it:

• Offer it early. Mention extra pre-holiday cleanings in your holiday email, with a limited number of slots.
• Price it clearly. An extra visit for a regular client can be a standard clean from your service list, with add-ons like Inside Oven before a big holiday dinner.
• Book it as its own visit. An extra cleaning is a one-off job, so it does not touch the series. A monthly client who gets an extra clean on December 20th still has their regular visit on the usual day. If those land close together, ask the client whether to skip the regular one.

Some clients will want to skip a visit instead, because the house will be full of relatives or they will be away. Skipped Visits on a Recurring Cleaning: Locked Doors, Sick Kids and Last-Minute Calls covers how skips fit into the schedule.

Look After the Teams

Holiday weeks are hard on teams: packed days, heavier homes, everyone stressed. Do not cram a full week of work into three days if it means teams cleaning until dark. It is better to move a few monthly clients to the following week and tell them why than to burn out your people right before the busiest season of the year.

Check the Schedule After

Before the holiday week starts, look over the Scheduled List one more time for any visit still sitting on a closed day. Holiday weeks are when homes most often slip, because a visit got pulled off its day and never got a new one. Fix those first. To see how holiday planning fits with the rest of recurring work, visit the MaidBossPro recurring cleaning software page.