Janitorial job costing by building: which cleaning accounts actually make money

Three exports, one spreadsheet

Pick the last full quarter, so every shift has been paid and every invoice has gone out. Then pull three exports and put each building on its own row.

• Payroll hours by employee and by job or building code, with the hourly rate, from the payroll provider or the timekeeping system. Include overtime as its own column.
• The bid sheet for each building: the hours a week it assumed, the frequencies, the wage rate it was priced on, and the monthly price that resulted.
• Invoiced revenue per building for the same quarter, from the accounting system: the recurring amount plus every extra billed, kept as separate columns.
• Supplies by building, if the company tracks them that way. If it does not, leave the column empty for now rather than guessing.

Three columns of numbers per building is enough to start. Software that already holds job codes and budgets can produce the same view, provided every hour was coded and every budget was updated after the last scope change. The by-hand version is a way to check that the software’s view is complete.

The hours with no building on them

When the payroll hours are added up by building code, some of them may belong to no building at all. Whatever share does is itself the finding. It shows where the company cannot yet see its own costs.

List the uncoded hours by type before deciding what to do with them. Spreading them evenly across every building is the tempting shortcut, and it hides exactly the information the exercise is meant to find: which buildings are drawing on hours nobody budgeted.

• Supervisor cover: the area supervisor who fills in for a call-off at one building, two nights a week
• Floater and relief cleaners scheduled where they are needed that night
• Floor crews on weekends doing strip and wax, extraction or post-construction cleans
• Training shifts, where a new cleaner works beside an experienced one on a specific route
• Travel between buildings for crews and supervisors who cover several sites in one shift

Hours like these can be assigned after the fact from the schedule, the supervisor’s texts or the floor crew’s calendar. What cannot be assigned goes on its own line, and the size of that line is the first number to bring down next quarter.

Janitorial job costing, column by column

For each building, the sheet needs a short set of columns. Each one comes from a record, not from memory.

• Revenue: recurring invoices plus extras billed for the quarter
• Hours bid per week, and hours paid per week, supervisor cover and assigned floater hours included
• Wages: hours paid times the rates actually paid on that building
• Labor burden: payroll taxes and workers’ comp at the company’s own rates, from the payroll provider and the insurance policy, not from a rule of thumb
• Supplies, where tracked
• Contribution: revenue minus wages, burden and supplies, in dollars and as a share of revenue

Illustrative example: three buildings each bill $10,000 a month. Building A was bid at 90 hours a week and pays about 88; Building B was bid at 90 and pays about 104, mostly supervisor cover and a longer trash run; Building C was bid at 70 and pays about 72, but its rate rose from $13 to $15 since the bid. All three look alike on the invoice register. Sorted by contribution, B sits at the bottom, C in the middle and A on top, and each one needs a different conversation. The numbers are invented for the example; the company’s own rows are the only ones that count.

Reading the result: hours, rate or scope

A building at the bottom of the sheet got there for one of a few reasons, and the reason decides the fix.

Paid hours above bid hours is a scope or a workload question. Either the building changed since the walkthrough — new tenants, more restrooms, a longer route to the dumpster — or the bid was thin from the start. The fix is a walkthrough with the property manager and a revised spec, priced as scope.

Hours on budget at a higher wage rate is a price question. Wages moved, by law or by the labor market, and the price did not. That is the case for a price increase letter, built from the building’s own wage rows.

Extras done and not billed is a billing question. If the floor crew’s weekend hours sit against a building whose invoice shows no extra for the same month, the gap is between the hallway request and the office.

And some buildings lose money at any reasonable price. One cleaning company, answering a 2017 Alignable thread on why cleaning companies underbid, said simply: “they have no idea of their costs.” A building priced that way, by anyone, will not be fixed by better supervision. Its options are a new price at renewal, a smaller scope, or letting it go at the next rebid.

Making it a monthly number

The by-hand exercise is worth doing once to see the shape of the problem. Its real value comes when it repeats without anyone rebuilding it.

• Every shift carries a building code in timekeeping, including supervisor cover and floater hours. A shift with no code is sent back before payroll closes.
• Every bid’s hours are entered as the building’s budget when the contract starts, and updated whenever the scope changes.
• Every extra gets a slip with a building and a price, or an owner’s written decision to do it for nothing.
• Once a month, the owner sees paid hours against bid hours for every building, and the three buildings with the lowest contribution, set against their own previous months.

The trend is the benchmark. A building that slips two months in a row is a conversation to have now, not at the rebid.

When this does not need outside help

A company with a few buildings, an owner who still walks each one and payroll that already codes every hour can run this in an afternoon and repeat it monthly. If the software already shows budgeted against actual hours by job, and every hour is coded, the work is reading the report, not building one.

An outside review earns its fee when the records do not connect: payroll with no building codes, bids kept in someone’s email, extras agreed in a lobby, contracts past their anniversary at the walkthrough price, payroll due weeks before the client pays. Our Revenue Review takes two weeks. It reads the company’s payroll export, bid sheets, invoices and contracts, read-only, and prices each building’s gap as a monthly dollar figure where the records support one. It grades no supervisors, gives no accounting, tax or legal advice, and leaves every pricing and staffing decision with the owner. We do not run a cleaning company, and there are no client case studies on this site yet.

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.