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Table of Contents
When you’re running a growing janitorial company, your focus is on delivering high-quality customer experiences for your clients. But your back office operations, such as billing, have a broader impact on a small business than you might think.
→ Optimizing and streamlining your invoicing process deserves at least as much attention as you give to the quality of your service.
Timely, accurate invoicing affects your cash flow, customer relationships, and your understanding of the profitability and growth potential of your business.
This article explains how to implement a free cleaning-company invoice template to improve your back-office operations and change the hard work of your janitorial services business.
Templates are a temporary fix; landscape invoicing software is a forever solution that scales with you
When your business reaches the growth stage where templates become a hindrance instead of a help, it’s time to implement a cloud-based software platform to run your operations.
This blog explains how the right software prevents you and your team from spending time on repetitive operational tasks and enables you to put your experience, skill, and ambition toward growing your business.
What is a commercial cleaning invoice template?
A commercial cleaning invoice template is a pre-designed, downloadable document for commercial cleaning companies to create standardized invoices for clients with professional outlines and branding.
A professional invoice includes the following:
A unique invoice number for tracking and record-keeping
Contact information for the client
Business information, including account manager contact info
Invoice date and the due date for partial or total payment
Janitorial services rendered to the client
Breakdown of hourly rates for labor and supplies and the total cost
Forgetting even one element of an invoice can cost your business money and hinder your customer relationships.
A template ensures every invoice you send to your customers is standardized, comprehensive, and professional.
Why is it important to use invoicing templates for janitorial services?
Relying on Microsoft Word or Excel spreadsheets to create and send invoices creates opportunities for mistakes that are easy to make and can hurt your bottom line.
Working from a single template ensures that:
Every team member uses the same process for billing for standardized workflow and customer experience
All required information gets sent to the client, and bills include details that make storing and recalling past invoices easy
Account managers have a detailed understanding of the services provided at every property
Depending on the size of your business, adhering to strict workflow processes may feel like overkill. However, the structure templates provide (in every aspect of your back office, from estimates to scheduling) creates opportunities for increased profitability and growth.
Standardized workflows help your team to be faster at repetitive tasks, reducing the amount of time invoicing takes each month
Being able to find past invoices quickly makes it easy to resolve billing disputes and increase client trust
Detailed invoices with unit prices for labor and material highlight upsell opportunities for account managers to increase revenue
Templates level up your business by providing organization that improves time management, accuracy, and efficiency.
How invoicing templates ensure accurate billing and improve efficiency
Standardizing the format of your invoices is the foundation of changing how you define efficiency for your business. By encouraging the adoption of a template workflow across your organization, you support your team in getting faster in generating and sending out invoices.
Accuracy in billing, from the process to the information on the invoice, provides a range of benefits for both your employees and clients:
Provide clarity for team members regarding the information invoices require
Make it clear to clients what they’re paying for with breakdowns for labor, supplies, and consumables
Eliminate disputes with issue dates and due dates, defining late payment and explaining late fees and consequences for past-due payment (such as suspended service)
Improve cash flow for your organization by offering options such as a credit card on file for monthly charges
The less time your team spends chasing forgotten invoices and late payments, the more time they have to invest in improving the business, generating pipeline, and landing new accounts.
Invoicing templates save time and effort
When you add templates to your processes, your employees don’t waste their hours at work chasing down mistakes in their own invoices or engaging in repetitive tasks that don’t help your bottom line.
Consider what would happen for your business if you eliminated the high-effort, time-consuming tasks from your team’s day. Your workforce would become more engaged by using their experience and talent to:
Define growth-focused goals for the next one to five years
Develop action plans for achieving those goals
Conduct market research and discover new opportunities
Identify inefficiencies in the business and create structures to eliminate them
See and resolve potential issues and challenges before they hurt the bottom line
The daily tasks of your operation, like creating and issuing invoices, aren’t the best use of your team. Giving your office staff templates to use makes growth and greater profitability possible.
How to use a janitorial invoicing template
Adoption by key stakeholders in the account management processes of your business is crucial to maximizing the benefits that using a template provides.
Download a free cleaning service invoice template
Not all templates are the same, and the first one you find may not resonate with how you run your business or the way you bill for services.
Consider your most critical requirements when choosing an invoice template, but also be prepared to change the way you bill customers if an invoice presents a more streamlined and efficient approach
Download the PDF template
Save the template in a designated folder accessible to all account managers to copy as needed
Consider saving the template to a Google Drive folder so you can easily download a backup if something happens to the copy on your computer.
Customize the template for your business
A key step in using a template for your business invoices is to customize it with your company’s branding and information.
Edit the company name, logo, and contact details on the template. If you don’t have a brand guide for your commercial cleaning company, consider working with a marketing company to unify your business materials, from business cards to your website and client communications.
Include relevant payment terms, such as due dates and accepted payment methods.
Modify the itemized sections to match the services your janitorial business offers and the supplies and consumables you provide, such as hand soap, trash bags, and toilet paper.
The more detailed your invoice, the more trust you build with customers regarding service prices. It also goes a long way to prevent misunderstandings and disputes over bill amounts.
Add client and project details
Once you’ve customized your template, ensure all account managers can access it and adjust the fields.
Assign a unique invoice number and date to make it easy to search your computer to find specific bills
Enter the client's name, the property address for service, and contact information, including phone number and email address
Add the project-specific details, such as consumables, service descriptions, and any notes for the account
Calculate and itemize charges
The more detailed the invoice, the more certainty and clarity there will be when the customer receives it.
While charging a flat rate for weekly cleaning services might feel easier, this step enables account managers to double-check job costing and identify potential upsell opportunities.
For every service, specify the number of labor hours, supplies, and materials
Multiple that figure by the unit price for each line item
Add applicable taxes
Calculate the invoice total amount before adding a line item for discounts, such as referral bonuses, or additional charges, such as late-fees
The more in-depth your knowledge of service costs, the better you understand your margins and business profitability.
→ Invoicing provides a gut check on whether you’re accurately charging your customers.
Review and proofread the invoice
While not the end of the world, a typo in an invoice can undermine your professionalism and credibility with your customers.
An error in the invoice figures can be a lot more damaging. Under- or overcharging a customer adds stress to your week.
→ Ten seconds of review can save you hours of hassle later.
Save and distribute the invoice
Establish a standardized way of saving invoices, including formatting for the file name. Organize by month and property to make it fast and efficient to locate past bills for a customer and to make it easier to close the month.
Once saved, issue the invoice to the client by their preferred billing method, either printed and mailed or by email.
Using printable documents for storage can be tempting for accessibility, but paper files just generate more hassle for your team. If you use secure cloud-based storage, there’s no need to rely on paper copies.
Streamline your invoicing process with Aspire's in-platform invoicing template
Aspire is a cloud-based business management software with customizable, in-platform workflow templates—including invoicing, estimating, purchasing, and more.
Instead of scouring the internet to find the perfect template for your business, Aspire creates client communications as part of its end-to-end functionality.
→Aspire is a single, unified software to generate, send, and store invoices (and everything else).
When you bill customers through Aspire, the billing functionality goes beyond what a template can do, including:
Automatic calculations for services, with included customizable profit margins
Automatically saved to Aspire’s CRM for an at-a-glance understanding of account standing
Populate invoices with information from estimates for unparalleled accuracy
Color-coding to identify aging and past-due invoices quickly
List and filter functionality to sort current and outstanding accounts
Accounting integrations, including QuickBooks, QuickBooks Online, and Acumatica, for streamlined bookkeeping
Janitorial companies that use Aspire quickly discover how much time has been wasted on tasks that software can do faster and more accurately.
The advantage of using Aspire's invoicing template
Once you know how your invoicing affects your business, from building lasting customer relationships to improving cash flow and giving accurate insight into your profitability, maximizing its benefits should become a top priority.
→ Throw out processes that require close oversight from account managers and implement Aspire to ensure billing and payments work to your advantage automatically.
Once you don’t have to focus on the struggle of billing, you can devote your attention to analyzing the data invoicing generates.
Understanding your most profitable services and best customers makes it easy to seize the opportunities that will fuel ongoing growth.
Download your template now
Take the first step toward the workflows and processes that empower efficiency and profitability for commercial cleaning businesses.
Aspire’s free janitorial invoicing template includes the must-have information every invoice needs, with professional formatting and a breakdown of services, materials, and consumables to maintain transparency and trust with your customers.
Don’t forget to use standardized file naming conventions to easily locate current and past-due invoices.
Benefits of using Aspire software for janitorial invoicing
While our free invoice template download is a great place to start, it’s not a long-term, scalable solution for the back office work of your commercial cleaning business.
When you’re ready to unify and integrate your entire organization (even across branches), then it’s time to implement Aspire’s end-to-end janitorial business management software.
Automated billing and payment tracking
What would it mean for your business if you brought greater detail and insight to the billing process? Aspire helps commercial cleaning companies to automate their invoicing with the following:
Generating invoices right from the estimate with included profit margins
Tracking payments with list and filter functionality to see past-due invoices
Automated payment reminders to improve cash flow and customer service
Implementing technology to eliminate rote tasks doesn’t just make the workday run smoother. It frees your team to devote their talent, innovation, and ambition to improving the business instead of simply operating within it.
Integration with accounting software
Manually transferring invoice data from Google Sheets or Microsoft Word to QuickBooks or another accounting platform is time-consuming and prone to errors.
→ A simple data-entry mistake can confuse and consume resources until the error is found.
Instead, Aspire uses a one-way data push to popular accounting platforms. Users benefit from reliable, accurate data on all their platforms, eliminating second-guessing and double-checking before making decisions to safeguard profitability or seize new opportunities.
Efficient invoice tracking and reporting
Sending bills is one thing, but understanding what invoices signify in terms of your organization’s cash flow, profitability, and growth potential is entirely different.
Templates can’t help with reporting and analysis.
→ Aspire was designed to operate behind the scenes of your operations, gathering data from every process to give business owners unparalleled insight and understanding.
With better understanding comes greater control—the kind that allows you to position yourself at the forefront of your market, making responsive decisions that ignite ongoing, limitless growth.
Secure and accessible storage
How are you currently storing past and current invoices in your organization? Paper printouts stored in filing cabinets, digital folders on computer desktops, or Google Drive folders for better access? All come with issues, whether that’s difficulty locating a specific entity or shortcomings in data security.
Aspire is a secure, cloud-based storage that provides easy access to historical invoices, client information, and financial records whenever needed.
Flexible payment options
Gone are the days when your customers handed your crew a check for services. Now, it’s your responsibility to make it easy and accessible for your customers to pay their bills. Keeping credit cards on file may work for a while, but as you scale, those manual tasks consume valuable time for your team in the office.
Aspire provides its users with a dedicated customer portal where property owners and managers can log in to:
Review and sign estimates
Check past-due balances
Make online payments with a credit card or ACH bank transfer
Communicate with account managers
The easier you make it for your customers to pay, the more you improve cash flow by mitigating late payments and forgotten invoices.
Try Aspire for efficient janitorial invoicing management
Easily manage your invoicing processes from bill creation to payment tracking with Aspire. We provide business owners with user-friendly, customizable end-to-end solutions for unparalleled workflow accuracy and professionalism.
Aspire provides the industry’s best functionality with features for:
Estimating with customizable templates and product kits
CRM with in-platform client communication
Scheduling and crew management with GPS time tracking
Payroll management
Purchasing through approved vendors and supply tracking
Real-time job costing and customizable reporting
Equipment management with service reminders
Invoicing and billing with accounting integrations
Schedule a free demonstration with Aspire to experience the benefits of efficient, integrated invoicing for commercial and office cleaning businesses.
866-727-7473
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390 S Woods Mill Road, Suite 200
Chesterfield, MO 63017
