Janitorial extra work not billed: the corridor stripped on Saturday, missing from the invoice on the 1st

Three kinds of extra, and only one of them is a miss

Before counting anything, sort the work. Not every floor job outside the nightly routine is billable on its own, and treating them all the same either overbills the customer or hides the real leak.

• Periodics already priced into the monthly. If the signed spec says the lobby VCT is stripped and refinished twice a year, that work is in the monthly price. It belongs on the schedule, not on an extra invoice. The miss here is the opposite one: a periodic in the spec that the crew stopped doing.
• Goodwill by decision. Some extras are done free on purpose — a spill cleaned before a board meeting, a favor for a new property manager. That is a fair choice when the owner makes it, knows the cost and can see how often it happens at each building.
• Work outside the spec, never priced. Floor work, extraction, post-construction cleanup, day-porter hours added for an event: work the signed spec does not include, done on a verbal yes, with no price set before the crew started and no line on any invoice. This is the leak.

Facility portals add a fourth case. Where a property manager’s accounts run through a work-order portal with a not-to-exceed amount on each job, work done before the work order exists, or past its cap, can be hard to invoice at all. For how a rejected portal invoice ages out of sight, see the guide on property manager invoices rejected in the portal.

The 90-day count: floor-crew work against invoice lines

This takes an afternoon with records the company already has. Pick the last 90 days that are fully invoiced.

• List every floor-crew and special-project shift in the period from the schedule and the payroll export: date, building, hours paid, and the crew members on it.
• Add what the schedule misses: ask each supervisor and night lead to forward the texts and emails in which a customer asked for something outside the routine. Each request becomes a row.
• For each row, open the signed spec for that building and mark it periodic in the spec, goodwill by decision, or outside the spec.
• For every row outside the spec, look for a matching line on that building’s invoices in the same month or the next one.
• Count the unmatched rows and price them: hours paid at the loaded wage rate, plus supplies, plus what the company would have charged had it quoted the job.

Illustrative example: a company finds 48 floor-crew and special-project shifts in 90 days. Thirty are periodics in the spec, six were goodwill the owner knew about, and twelve were outside the spec. Of those twelve, five appear on an invoice; seven do not. Seven unbilled jobs in a quarter at a few hundred dollars each is a number worth fixing; the same count could just as easily come back at zero. Those numbers are invented for the example. The company’s own count is the only benchmark that matters, and a building with no hours coded to it is itself a finding.

The extra-work slip, before the crew starts

The fix is one page that exists before the work starts, not a new system. The night lead who hears the request fills it in on a phone, or on paper and photographs it, and nothing outside the spec begins until it exists.

• Building, area and task, in the words of the spec where possible: “second-floor corridor, strip and refinish, about 1,800 sq ft.”
• The price, or a not-to-exceed amount if the size of the job is not known yet.
• The requester’s name and a written approval — a reply to a text or an email from the property manager is enough to start the record.
• Who will do it and when, so the hours can be tied to the slip in payroll.
• A $0 slip when the owner decides the work is goodwill. It costs nothing to write and keeps the decision visible.

The slip does two jobs at once. It tells the office that billable work exists, and it gives the property manager a written number before the buffer comes out, which is an easier conversation than an invoice that arrives as a surprise. Whether a text or an email counts as approval under a given contract is a question for the company’s attorney; the slip records what was agreed either way.

Matching slips to invoices before the 1st

Slips only pay if someone matches them. Pick a fixed day a few days before the recurring invoices go out — the 25th works for a company that bills on the 1st — and give the match one owner in the office.

On that day, every slip from the month is in one of three states: billed on the building’s next invoice, marked $0 by the owner, or still open. An open slip holds that building’s recurring invoice until it is resolved. Then compare the slips with the floor-crew schedule for the same month; a floor-crew shift with no slip and no periodic in the spec is a request that went around the slip, and it goes back to the supervisor who scheduled it.

This is the cleaning version of a problem other trades with field crews share. Construction subcontractors know it as the time-and-materials tag that rides in a truck instead of reaching the pay application; the guide on unsigned T&M tags covers that version. The principle is the same: the record of extra work has to reach billing on a schedule, not on someone’s memory.

Talking to the property manager about extras

Billing every extra is not the goal; deciding every extra is. A property manager who has been receiving free floor work for two years will notice the first invoice line, so the change goes better as a conversation than as a surprise.

Lead with the standard, not the backlog: from next month, anything outside the spec gets a short written quote or not-to-exceed amount before the crew starts, and the property manager approves it in writing. Periodics already in the spec stay in the monthly price. Small favors stay small favors, by the owner’s choice. A property manager working to a budget has to explain every line to an owner of their own, and a number before the work makes that easier, not harder.

What to do about unbilled extras from past months is the owner’s decision, and whether they can be billed at all depends on the contract and on what was agreed at the time — a question for the company’s attorney, not for this guide. Counting first means that decision gets made with a number instead of a feeling.

When this is not worth paying anyone for

The count and the slip above are designed to be run in-house, and for a company whose payroll codes hours to buildings they should be. A company with a handful of buildings where the owner takes every request personally can check its extras by eye. If the 90-day count comes back with nothing outside the spec unbilled, the routine is already working; keep it.

An outside review earns its fee when extras are one leak among several and the records are too scattered to connect in an afternoon: hours with no building code, buildings running past their bid hours, contracts still at the walkthrough price, portal invoices aging where AR does not show them. Our Revenue Review takes two weeks. It works from read-only access to the company’s schedules, payroll export, signed specs and invoices, and prices each leak as a monthly dollar figure where the records support one. It contacts no property manager, inspects no cleaning, gives no legal advice and moves no money. Nobody here runs a cleaning company, and there are no client case studies on this site yet. For how that fits next to a coach or a commercial cleaning consultant, see what each kind of help costs.

If it is unclear whether any of this is worth a fee, start with a free 20-minute call, where a company too small for the arithmetic is told so.