Know what an hour of your own time costs
Ask a cleaning-business owner what they charge and you get an instant answer. Ask what an hour costs them and the room goes quiet.
That second number is the one that decides whether the first one is any good, and almost nobody has worked it out — because the honest version has to carry the driving. You are out of the house for eight hours and you bill six. The other two are insurance, the van, the phone, the plates, the accountant, and the vacuum you will have to replace, all of it carried by the hours somebody actually pays for.
The Job & Route Manager builds that number once, then applies it to everything: every recurring client, every service day, every quote you write.
The part most cleaning templates miss
Almost every cleaning template prices the hours you are on site. This one prices the whole clock.
Drive time is charged to the client who caused it, at what an hour of your working day really costs — so a two-hour turnover with a 55-minute drive stops looking like a two-hour job. In the worked example that ships inside the file, exactly that stop reads as perfectly reasonable work on the calendar and quietly takes about $1,100 a year out of the business. It is not the cheapest client on the list, and you would never find it by looking at prices.
Supplies get the same treatment — costed per use, charged to the visit, and deliberately kept out of the hourly overhead so a deep clean prices itself higher and nothing is counted twice.
What route density is, and why it sets your real rate
Route density is the share of your working day that somebody is paying for: on-site hours divided by the whole block, driving included.
At 90% density a $60 on-site hour is worth $54 for every hour your day actually costs you. At 65% the same $60 is worth $39 — you did not change your price, your quality, or your client, you just spent more of the day in the van. The Route Day Planner rolls your roster up by service day and by zone, weights each client by how often you actually go, and hands back a density and a revenue-per-clock-hour for each. Nothing to type: it reads the roster.
What’s in the workbook
- Cost per Hour — billable hours, the vehicle costed per mile, a year of fixed overhead, and your own pay, in and two rates out: a cost per billable hour to price against, and a cost per clock hour to charge visits with.
- Client Roster — one row per recurring client, with visits a year, cost per visit, profit, margin, dollars per clock hour, a colored Underwater / Thin / Healthy / Strong status, and the next due date.
- Route Day Planner — stops, billable hours, unpaid drive hours, route density, revenue per clock hour and how much of the day you have sold, by day and by zone.
- Quote a Job — three prices from four inputs and a margin: a floor you never quote, your target price, and a premium tier. Drive time is entered one way, the same convention the roster uses.
- Supplies & Restock — cost per unit, cost per use, the kit a standard visit burns, and par-level reorder flags.
- Job Log — what each visit really took, against what you quoted, with a ran-long flag.
- Dashboard — recurring revenue, the spread you keep per clock hour, status-band counts, density by day, what’s overdue, and a year check: does the book fill the hours, and cover the pay, your rate assumes?
- Setup & Lists — the frequency table, the dropdown lists, and every threshold as an editable cell. Change one number and the whole workbook re-colors.
Pre-filled, so nothing is blank on the first open
It arrives with a complete worked example: ten recurring clients across five zones, a twelve-item supply kit, five logged visits, and a live dashboard — including one client who is underwater, one service day that is mostly windshield, and a year check showing the book coming up short of its owner’s pay target. You can watch how the whole thing behaves before you type a single number of your own — then clear it and enter your book.
Try it free first: the Recurring Job Schedule Planner — a free, ungated one-tab planner that turns your recurring clients into visits a year, annual revenue, and next-due dates. It arrives pre-filled with the same worked example. What it cannot tell you is which of those clients actually make money — that is what the full workbook is for.
Prefer Google Sheets? No import needed
The download includes a clickable Open in Google Sheets page. Click Make a copy and you get your own private, fully working native Google Sheet — every dropdown, formula, conditional color and calculated cell already set up and tested in Sheets. The .xlsx works natively in Excel and LibreOffice Calc.
Own it, don’t rent it
This is a file you own, not a monthly app you rent. Buy once, keep it forever, run it your way — no per-job fees, no subscription, no account, and no client data leaving your computer. It sits right between a blank spreadsheet (free, but you build it all yourself) and field-service software (overkill, per-user pricing, and locked in).
When one van becomes two, Ardent Seller (opens in new tab) is the living version of this file — your supplies, costs and margins tracked in one place and computed across the whole operation. There’s a free plan, and you keep the workbook either way.
A note on the numbers
This workbook is a business reference, not licensed tax, accounting, legal, employment, or chemical-safety advice. Every figure in the examples is illustrative — insurance, fuel, wages, supply prices and the hours you can bill vary enormously by region and by what you clean. Your licensing, bonding, insurance, worker classification, and wage-and-hour obligations (including pay for travel time between jobs) are yours to meet for your jurisdiction, and a product label always overrides anything written here.
