At the start of September I sat down with a couple who run a cleaning business in Geelong. They've been going a few years. Client details lived in their phones, jobs were tracked by hand, and they were running two accounting packages side by side and wanted to settle on Xero.
That's pretty normal for a business that's grown faster than its paperwork. They came in wanting to talk about job software, but most of the meeting ended up on pricing. They had no price list. Every quote came from memory, and by their own account they were often undercharging.
Software can't automate a price you don't have
Job software like ServiceM8 can build your quotes and invoices for you, but only from prices you've put in. If every price lives in someone's head, the software has nothing to work from, and you're back to typing a number into every job.
So we agreed on an order. Set the prices first. Move the accounts to Xero. Then connect ServiceM8 to Xero and let it handle the invoicing. Basics first.
Two ways to price a clean
We talked through two models.
The first is hourly, whatever the job. It's easy to explain and you're paid for the time you're there. The catch is the client doesn't know the total until you've finished.
The second is a fixed price based on the size of the house, worked out from bedrooms and bathrooms. The client knows the total before you start, and it's easy to set up in software because each house size is just a line item.
Either one works. What matters is that the number comes from somewhere. What I'd do is work out what a job actually costs you (wages, travel, products, the time it takes) and work back to the margin you need. When a client pushes back on a price built that way, you know exactly what's underneath it, and that makes it a lot easier to hold.
Raising prices on existing clients
The harder bit is the clients already on old prices. ServiceM8 lets you set individual prices per client, so you can lift them one at a time, in small steps. You don't have to send everyone the same letter on the same day.
When we doubled our own prices
I told them about our own experience. Two years ago, back when we were Tech on Demand, we doubled our prices. We lost about 40% of our clients. Revenue went up.
I'm not suggesting a cleaning business needs to go that far, and our numbers won't match theirs. What it taught us is that losing some clients after a price rise can still leave you ahead when the old prices were too low.
If you're picking job software, our ServiceM8 vs Tradify guide compares the two for small teams, and our ServiceM8 page explains how we set it up with Xero. The wider invoicing side is on our get paid page. If you only do one thing this week, though, write down what your three most common jobs actually cost you.