The Payment Problem That Grows With Every Cleaner You Hire
When you started your cleaning business, payment was simple. You cleaned a house, the client left cash on the kitchen table or transferred the money that evening. You knew every client by name, and if someone forgot to pay, you mentioned it at the next visit. No system needed — it just worked.
Then you hired your second cleaner. Then your fifth. Now you have a team of twelve cleaners, each doing three to four cleans a day. That is somewhere between thirty-six and forty-eight individual payments every single day. Two hundred or more per week. Over a thousand per month. And the system that worked when it was just you no longer works at all.
Here is what typically happens. Your cleaners finish their jobs and your office sends invoices — either by email or, in too many businesses, still on paper. Some clients pay straight away. Some pay within a week. Some need a reminder. Some need two reminders. Some need a phone call. A few need a stern letter before they pay. And through all of this, your office team — who should be scheduling jobs, managing clients, and growing the business — is spending hours every week chasing money for work that was completed days or weeks ago.
The maths is punishing. If just 15% of your clients pay late (and for most cleaning businesses, the figure is higher), and your team spends an average of ten minutes per chase across reminder emails, texts, and calls, a business with two hundred weekly clients is losing over five hours of admin time every week to payment chasing alone. That is a part-time salary spent on asking people to pay for services they have already received.
The recurring nature of cleaning makes this particularly painful. A plumber who does a one-off job and does not get paid has lost one payment. A cleaning business that has a client who pays two weeks late every time has a permanent cash flow drag — and multiply that across twenty or thirty slow-paying clients, and you are consistently carrying thousands of pounds in completed but unpaid work.
Cash payments — still common in residential cleaning — create their own problems. Cash gets lost, amounts get disputed, and there is no automatic record for your accounts. Your cleaners become responsible for handling money, which is a distraction from the job and a source of potential conflict. And cash makes it nearly impossible to grow beyond a certain size, because you cannot track, reconcile, or forecast cash income at scale.
Your Options for Collecting Cleaning Payments
The right payment method for your cleaning business depends on your client mix (residential vs. commercial), the size of your team, and whether your revenue is primarily recurring or one-off. Here is an honest comparison of every realistic option.
Payment Links
A payment link is a URL that opens a secure checkout page where your customer pays by card. Your cleaner finishes a job, a link is sent by text message, and the customer pays on their phone. No hardware, no cash, no invoice to chase.
For cleaning businesses, payment links solve the core problem: collecting payment at the point of service, even when the customer is not present. This is critical for cleaning because a large proportion of residential cleans happen while the homeowner is at work. Your cleaner cannot collect a card tap or cash from someone who is not there. But a text message reaches them wherever they are, and the payment link converts the completed clean into collected revenue within minutes rather than weeks.
Payment links work across every type of cleaning work. Regular weekly residential cleans, fortnightly deep cleans, one-off end-of-tenancy jobs, commercial office cleaning — the same system handles all of them. The amount and description change per link, but the workflow is identical: clean complete, link sent, payment received.
For a cleaning business with fifteen cleaners doing an average of three and a half jobs each per day, payment links eliminate the need to send, track, and chase approximately fifty invoices daily. Over a month, that is over a thousand invoices your office never needs to produce, monitor, or follow up on.
Best for: per-clean billing, teams of cleaners, clients who are not present during the clean, variable amounts, one-off jobs. Weakness: requires the customer to actively tap and pay (though immediate sending after cleaning produces high completion rates).
Direct Debit
For cleaning businesses with a significant base of recurring clients paying the same amount on the same schedule — weekly residential cleans at £50, monthly office cleaning at £400 — Direct Debit is the lowest-effort collection method. The customer authorises the payment once, and it collects automatically. No invoice, no reminder, no link, no interaction at all.
GoCardless is the most common Direct Debit provider for cleaning businesses. Per-transaction fees are typically lower than card payment fees (around 1-2%), and the automatic collection means your office does not touch these payments at all. For a cleaning business with eighty regular weekly clients on Direct Debit, that is eighty payments collected automatically every week — a transformative reduction in admin workload.
The downsides are setup friction and inflexibility. Each customer needs to complete a Direct Debit mandate (an online form authorising the payment), which takes more effort than simply paying a link. Some residential customers are uncomfortable authorising ongoing access to their bank account. And if the amount changes — an extra room cleaned, a different schedule for a holiday week, a product charge — you need to adjust the mandate or collect the difference separately.
Direct Debit payments also take two to three working days to reach your account, and customers have a right to request a refund through their bank for a period after the payment. This is rarely a problem in practice, but it means Direct Debit payments are not as immediately "final" as card payments.
Best for: fixed recurring amounts, high-volume regular clients, reducing admin overhead. Weakness: inflexible for variable amounts, setup friction, slower to clear, not suitable for one-off jobs.
Card Machines
Portable card terminals from SumUp, Zettle, Square, and others let customers tap their card for instant payment. They are straightforward, familiar, and the payment confirms immediately.
For cleaning businesses, card machines are almost entirely impractical. The fundamental issue is that your cleaners are cleaning — they are inside a customer's home or office, doing physical work, often with wet hands, moving between rooms, using chemical products. Expecting them to also carry, maintain, and operate a card terminal is unrealistic. Card machines need charging, they need mobile signal or WiFi, and they add a step to the end of every job that your cleaners should not be responsible for.
More importantly, a large proportion of cleaning clients are not present during the clean. A card machine is useless if there is no card to tap. For office cleaning that happens in the evening after staff have left, for residential cleans during working hours, for Airbnb turnovers between guests — the customer simply is not there.
If you are a sole cleaner doing a small number of jobs per day where the client is always home, a single card machine can work. But for any cleaning business with a team, card machines are not a viable primary payment method.
Best for: sole operators with clients who are always present. Weakness: impractical for teams, useless when the client is absent, requires hardware per cleaner, ongoing costs.
Bank Transfers
Bank transfer is what most cleaning businesses start with and what many continue to use long after they have outgrown it. You send an invoice (or just a text message) with your sort code and account number, and the customer transfers the money when they choose to.
For cleaning, the chase rate on bank transfers is particularly high. The perceived value of a regular clean is lower than, say, a plumbing repair or an electrician visit. A customer who has just had a blocked drain fixed will pay promptly because the relief is immediate and tangible. A customer whose house was cleaned while they were at work comes home to a tidy house and — because tidiness is the default expectation — the urgency to pay is lower. The result is that cleaning invoices requesting bank transfers consistently have some of the longest average payment times of any trade.
At scale, bank transfer reconciliation is also a significant problem. When you have fifty clients all paying by transfer with varying reference formats (some use their name, some use their address, some use nothing), matching payments to clients becomes a manual, error-prone process. Your bookkeeper or accountant spends hours every month reconciling bank statements against your client list.
Best for: businesses with a handful of trusted, long-term clients. Weakness: high chase rate, no urgency mechanism, painful reconciliation at scale, no automation.
Invoicing Software with Payment Links
Accounting tools like Xero, QuickBooks, and FreshBooks — as well as cleaning-specific software like ZenMaid, Jobber, and Launch27 — can send invoices with embedded payment buttons. The customer opens the invoice email, clicks "Pay Now," and pays by card.
This is a meaningful step up from manual invoicing, and if you already use accounting software, enabling the payment feature is straightforward. The payment is automatically reconciled against the invoice, saving your bookkeeper significant time.
The limitation is delivery. Invoicing software typically sends payment requests by email. For cleaning clients — who are often residential customers checking email sporadically — this is slower than SMS. A text message is read within three minutes on average. An invoice email might sit in an inbox for days, especially if it lands in a promotions or spam folder. The payment rate is better than a plain invoice, but worse than a payment link sent by text immediately after the clean.
The best approach for many cleaning businesses is to use both: invoicing software for accounting, record-keeping, and commercial clients who require formal invoices, and standalone payment links by SMS for the actual collection from residential clients.
Best for: businesses already using accounting software, commercial clients requiring invoices. Weakness: email delivery is slower than SMS, less effective for residential clients.
How Payment Links Work for Cleaning Businesses
The practical workflow for a cleaning business using payment links depends on whether you are billing per clean, per week, or per month. Here is how it works for each scenario your business handles.
Scenario 1: Per-clean billing (residential). Sarah, one of your team of fifteen cleaners, finishes a two-hour regular clean at a residential property. The homeowner is at work. Sarah locks up with the spare key, and the system sends a payment link to the customer by text message: "Hi Mrs Chen, your clean at 14 Birch Close is complete. Pay £60 here: [link]." Mrs Chen sees the text on her phone at work, taps the link, enters her card details, and the payment is done. Total time from clean completion to payment: typically under ten minutes. No invoice generated, no chase required, no office involvement.
Scenario 2: End-of-tenancy deep clean. A letting agent books an end-of-tenancy clean for a three-bedroom flat. Your quote is £320. You send a payment link for a £100 deposit when the booking is confirmed — this secures the slot in your schedule and reduces the risk of cancellation. On the day, your team completes the clean, and a second payment link for the remaining £220 is sent to the letting agent. For letting agents who book regularly, you build a trusted relationship where payment becomes automatic and fast.
Scenario 3: Commercial office cleaning. You clean an accountancy firm's offices three evenings per week. The monthly total is £1,200. At the end of each month, you send a payment link for £1,200 with a clear description. The office manager pays by card. If the firm requires a formal invoice for their records, you send the invoice from your accounting software and the payment link separately — or use accounting software that includes a payment button in the invoice email.
Scenario 4: Airbnb turnover cleaning. You handle turnover cleans for a property management company with twelve Airbnb listings. The volume and timing varies — some weeks you do fifteen turnovers, some weeks you do six. After each clean, a payment link is sent for the agreed amount. The property management company pays per clean, and both parties have a complete record of every job and every payment without any monthly invoicing or reconciliation.
The common pattern across all scenarios is that payment collection happens automatically at the point of service completion. Your office does not send invoices. Your cleaners do not handle money. The system sends the request, the customer pays, and your dashboard updates. For a cleaning business processing forty to sixty payments per day, this is the difference between having a full-time person dedicated to billing and having no billing function at all.
The conversion data is compelling. Payment links sent by text within five minutes of a clean being completed typically achieve a same-day payment rate of 85-95%. Invoices sent by email at the end of the week achieve a same-week payment rate of 50-65%. For a cleaning business doing a thousand cleans per month, that difference represents a cash flow improvement of tens of thousands of pounds.
What to Look For in a Payment System for Cleaning Businesses
Cleaning businesses have unique characteristics — high payment volumes, recurring relationships, absent customers, and teams of staff — that mean generic payment advice does not always apply. Here is what specifically matters when choosing a payment system for a cleaning operation.
Volume handling. A cleaning business with fifteen cleaners can generate fifty or more payments per day. Your payment system needs to handle this volume without bottlenecks. Check that there are no daily transaction limits, that the dashboard remains usable at high volumes, and that reporting can handle hundreds of transactions per week without slowing down.
SMS as the primary delivery channel. Email works for commercial clients who sit at desks. For residential cleaning clients — the majority of most cleaning businesses' revenue — text message is the only reliable delivery channel. Make sure your payment provider offers SMS delivery as a first-class feature, not an afterthought. Check the SMS delivery rate, the speed, and whether messages are sent from a branded sender name rather than a random number.
No hardware requirement. Your cleaners should not carry, charge, or operate payment hardware. They should clean. Any payment system that requires your cleaners to do anything beyond their normal routine is a system that will not be used consistently. The ideal setup is entirely invisible to your cleaning team — the payment request is triggered automatically when the job is marked complete, with no action required from the cleaner.
Recurring payment support. Most cleaning revenue is recurring. Your payment system must handle this — either through automated payment link scheduling (send a link every Tuesday after Mrs Jones's clean) or Direct Debit integration for fixed-amount regular clients. Managing recurring billing manually at scale is unsustainable.
Per-transaction pricing. Cleaning businesses have variable revenue — seasonal dips (fewer cleans in December and January when clients cancel for holidays), lost clients, new clients. A payment system with fixed monthly fees penalises you during slow periods. Per-transaction pricing means your payment costs scale exactly with your revenue. Check for hidden fees: some providers charge per SMS, per user, per payout, or have minimum monthly charges buried in the terms.
Team management and visibility. You need to know which cleaners' jobs are paid and which are outstanding. A payment system with team features — individual accounts for each cleaner or crew, with a centralised office dashboard — gives you real-time visibility without requiring your cleaners to report back on payments. Look for the ability to filter by cleaner, by date, by status (paid, pending, overdue), and by client.
Client communication. The payment link message is a touchpoint with your customer. A well-branded, clear payment request ("Your clean at [address] is complete — pay here") reinforces professionalism. A generic, unbranded payment page creates hesitation. Check that you can customise the message text, the payment page branding, and the confirmation message the customer receives after paying.
Payout speed. Cleaning businesses typically have tight margins and regular payroll commitments (your cleaners need paying every week or fortnight regardless of whether clients have paid you). Next-day or same-day payouts to your bank account smooth out cash flow and reduce the risk of shortfalls on payroll day. Providers that hold funds for three to five days create unnecessary cash flow pressure.
Reporting that supports business decisions. Good payment data tells you more than just who has paid. It tells you which clients consistently pay late (so you can move them to Direct Debit or drop them), which days generate the most revenue (so you can optimise scheduling), and what your average payment speed is (so you can forecast cash flow accurately). Look for exportable reports and, ideally, integration with your accounting software.