Time tracking for cleaning companies: proof, not paperwork

Monday morning, just gone seven, and the first call is already a complaint. The client says nobody was on site on Saturday, the washrooms untouched, the entrance not mopped. You look at the timesheet that landed on your desk on Friday: two names, four hours, early Saturday. On paper they were there. Proving it is another matter.

That is how nearly every dispute starts in a cleaning company. Not with bad faith, but with the lack of proof. Your people work scattered, five in the morning in an office block, nine at night in a retail unit, each in a different place, nobody seeing anybody else. The supervisor pieces the hours together on Friday from memory, sometimes from the memory of three days back, and what is left is a number in a spreadsheet that nobody quite trusts. Not the client, not the payroll bureau, and if you are honest, not you either.

For years that was an internal nuisance, a bit of friction, a couple of arguments at month end. Now it is more. On a commercial contract the labour cost is the first line the client checks, and it has to match the hours actually worked, premiums included: a night shift and a Sunday are not paid the same, and one hour is not the same as another. If you do not know exactly when someone really started, you either overpay or you pay wrong, and in a trade where the margin is already a thin blade, getting the hours wrong is getting the books wrong.

HMRC does not check your good intentions

And then there is the other side, the one most people underrate until it knocks on the door. Under the Working Time Regulations you have to keep adequate records of the hours your staff work, and under the National Minimum Wage rules you must be able to show that every hour was paid at least the legal rate, with records kept for years and produced to HMRC on request. Fall short and the bill is not just back pay: an underpayment finding brings penalties on top, and your name can end up on the public list of employers who got it wrong. Cleaning sits high on the radar precisely because so much of it happens inside other people’s buildings at awkward hours. A timesheet written on Friday from memory, in that light, is not documentation, it is a hope.

The bitter part is that your people usually did the work. The four hours on Saturday were real, the entrance was mopped, the client is mistaken or shaving the price. You just cannot show the opposite, and by the end of the day you lose an argument you had already won before it started. Not because you are in the wrong, but because your proof is a sheet of paper that could just as easily have been filled in another way.

---

And the staff? Won’t they feel watched?

That is the first objection you hear the moment the word GPS comes up, and it is a fair one. Nobody wants to spend the day as a dot on a map. But that is not what this is. There is a difference between tracking that runs all day long and a stamp that records, once on the way in and once on the way out, where the job was. The ICO has been clear about it: monitoring at work has to be necessary and proportionate, the least intrusive option that does the job, with people told plainly what is recorded and why. Two stamps clear that bar. Continuous surveillance does not, and you do not need it anyway.

Framed that way, the thing protects your staff before anyone else. The Saturday shift the client denies is there in black and white. The overtime that would otherwise vanish becomes visible and gets paid. And at month end there is nothing left to argue about, because the numbers do not come from you and they do not come from the supervisor, they come from the moment itself.

A record that writes itself

The knot, underneath it all, is simpler than any rule. A timesheet tells you that someone wrote down four hours. It does not tell you whether that person was really on the right site at five, or whether the number was put together at the kitchen table. Start, end, place: exactly what counts is exactly what the paper leaves out. So you are not managing hours, you are managing claims, and claims hold up to the client, the payroll bureau and the inspector only until one of them asks for proof. The answer is to let the time record itself where it happens, the moment it happens: not reconstructed on Friday, but stamped on the way into the site and on the way out, with time and location, fixed and unaltered.

That is exactly what GeoTapp does. The cleaner clocks in from the app on site and clocks out again, the location and the time stay tied to the shift, and back in the office you see in real time who started and where. The timesheet nobody trusts becomes a record nobody has to doubt, not the client, not payroll, not the inspector. The hours are already right, premiums and bands and all, before they ever reach the wage run.

How many Monday phone calls would you have saved yourself, if you could have answered the complaint with the stamp from Saturday morning, time and site in hand?