QuickBooks for Cleaning Business: Setup That Shows Profit

Quick Answer: To set up QuickBooks for a cleaning business, create a service item for each kind of visit, put repeat clients on recurring sales receipts or invoices, and build a chart of accounts that separates cleaning supplies, subcontracted cleaners, staff wages and vehicle costs. Turn on class tracking (QuickBooks Online Plus or Advanced) to split residential from commercial work, then read the Profit and Loss by Class report each month.

QuickBooks for a cleaning business is mostly about setup: the same handful of services sold again and again, a few large cost lines (labor, supplies, driving), and a need to see which kind of work earns the most. The steps below use QuickBooks Online menus from Intuit's help pages; Desktop works on the same ideas with different screens.

What should you set up first?

Do it in this order, because each step uses the one before it:

1. Chart of accounts, so every service and expense has somewhere to land.
2. Service items for what you sell, each pointing at an income account.
3. Classes or locations, if you want profit by service line or territory.
4. Customers, with billing frequency noted.
5. Recurring transactions for regular clients.
6. Bank and card connections, so expenses flow in to be categorized.

Steps 1 to 3 take an afternoon. Getting them right first saves recategorizing months of transactions later.

What does a cleaning company's chart of accounts look like?

QuickBooks creates a default list. Trim it and add accounts that match how a cleaning business spends money. A workable starting point:

Putting supplies, subcontractors and direct labor in cost of sales gives you a gross profit line that answers the question owners ask most: after paying the people and products that do the cleaning, what is left? Our chart of accounts guide explains numbering and how many accounts are too many.

How do you add services for recurring visits?

Intuit's add product and service items article gives the path: All apps > Sales & Get Paid > Products & services, then New ▼ > Service. Each service has a name, an optional SKU, category and class, a sales description, a rate, an income account and a sales tax setting.

Name items the way you quote, so invoices read clearly and reports group sensibly:

• Standard clean - 2 bed and Standard clean - 3 bed, priced per visit
• Commercial clean - hourly, priced per hour
• Deep clean, Move-out clean
• Add-on - inside oven, Add-on - interior windows

Point each at the matching income account from the table above. Weekly, biweekly and monthly frequency is better kept on the customer or the recurring template than in the item name; otherwise you end up with a dozen near-identical items.

How do recurring clients get billed automatically?

Most residential clients book a weekly or biweekly clean, which is exactly what recurring templates are for. Intuit's recurring sales receipt instructions:

1. Go to All apps > Accounting > Recurring transactions.
2. Choose Sales Receipt as the transaction type.
3. Name the template (clients do not see the name).
4. Set Type to Scheduled.
5. Choose the customer and check their email; you can have the receipt emailed automatically.
6. Set the interval, for example monthly on the 1st, or a weekly pattern.
7. Choose start and end: no end date, end By a date, or end After a set number of occurrences.
8. Pick credit card or E-Check as the payment method.
9. Add the service lines and amounts, then Save template.

A recurring sales receipt records payment at the same time as the sale, which suits clients who pay by card on file. Clients who pay after the visit, such as most commercial contracts, are a better fit for invoices. Intuit also documents setting up autopay for recurring invoices for clients who want to be charged automatically against an invoice.

If you only want a one-off receipt, Intuit's sales receipt article uses + Create > Sales receipt, then the customer, the service and Save or Save and send.

How do you see profit by type of cleaning?

Classes let you label every sale and expense with a segment, then report on each segment separately. A cleaning company might use Residential, Commercial and Specialty (deep and move-out work).

Intuit's turn on class tracking steps:

1. Open Settings, then Account and settings.
2. Select Advanced, then Categories.
3. In the class settings, choose either One to entire transaction or One to each row in transaction.
4. Optionally tick Warn me when a transaction isn't assigned a class.
5. Save.

Pick One to each row if a single invoice can mix a commercial contract with a specialty add-on; otherwise one per transaction is simpler. Class tracking is available in QuickBooks Online Plus and Advanced, according to Intuit's class tracking overview, which also suggests location tracking instead if you operate from several locations. A company with two branch offices could use locations for the branch and classes for the service line.

To read the result, go to Reports > Standard reports, find the Business overview group and run Profit and Loss by Class. It groups income, expenses and net income by class, and Customize lets you change the date range.

How should you record cleaners: employees or 1099 contractors?

Cleaning companies often have both: staff cleaners on payroll and independent cleaners paid per job. Keep them clearly apart in QuickBooks.

• Employees are paid through payroll, and their wages and employer taxes post to the direct labor account.
• Independent contractors are paid outside payroll, tracked in QuickBooks for 1099 reporting, and their payments post to the subcontracted cleaners account.

Whether a cleaner is an employee or a contractor is a legal question about how the work is controlled, not a bookkeeping preference. The IRS page on forms and associated taxes for independent contractors explains the paperwork, and QuickBooks' own contractor tools are described in Intuit's help center. Record the class on contractor bills too, so subcontracted commercial work shows up against commercial revenue.

Getting bank and card activity in

Supplies bought at a warehouse store, fuel, and software subscriptions mostly arrive through bank and card feeds. Connected accounts download transactions for you to categorize; our guide to categorizing bank transactions in QuickBooks Online covers rules for repeat merchants such as your usual supply store.

If a feed breaks, or you are catching up on months before you started QuickBooks, Intuit's manual upload article covers importing statement files. QuickBankConvert is useful when the bank only gives you PDFs for those older months: it turns each statement into CSV, or into a QBO file on a paid plan, which you then upload yourself. See the QuickBooks integration page for the formats.

A monthly routine that keeps it tidy

• Categorize every downloaded transaction and assign a class.
• Check that each recurring template ran, and pause it for clients who cancelled.
• Run Profit and Loss by Class and compare gross margin across segments.
• Reconcile each bank and card account to its statement.
• Review supplies spending per class; a commercial contract that eats supplies is a pricing problem, not a bookkeeping one.

If you are still planning the business rather than running it, the startup cost template uses a cleaning service as its example and covers the costs before the first client.