Daily Targets and Bonus Work for Window Cleaning Crews: Measure Capacity in Points, Not Jobs

Why is job count the wrong measure?

Because the jobs are not the same size. An all-around clean does the front and the back of a house. A front-only clean takes roughly half the time. A list of 30 jobs could be a full day, a light day or an impossible day depending on the mix, so a target in jobs is either unfair to the crew or bad for the business.

Measuring in full-home equivalents, or simply points, fixes this:

The last row matters. When a front-only customer asks for the backs on the doorstep, the crew should get the credit, the customer should get one invoice with both lines, and their next visit should stay front-only unless they change it.

How do you set a daily target?

1. Pick a minimum rate. The company I built for uses 3 full homes per hour per van.
2. Multiply by the van's working hours. Hours times rate gives the daily minimum in points. Vans with different hours get different targets.
3. Add two bonus levels above it. Bonus 1 and Bonus 2 give a quick crew something to aim for and make extra work worth doing.
4. Check every van against target in the morning, not at 4pm. A van that starts the day short should be topped up before it leaves the yard.

How should bonus work work?

Hold a small buffer of nearby work around each van, and make sure bonus work is never lost. The rule from the live system's brief: if a crew does bonus work on Monday drawn from Tuesday's nearby houses, Tuesday adjusts. If they do not get to it, those houses simply stay on Tuesday where they were. Nothing disappears because someone tried to earn a bonus.

A bonus buffer doubles as skip cover. When a locked gate knocks a point off the day, the same reserve of nearby work keeps the van on target. See missed visits for how skips are handled.

How do you top up a van that will finish short?

Offer work that can be pulled forward, nearest to where the van is standing first. In the live system, Top up looks only in the van's own postcodes, only within pull-forward limits (up to 6 days early for 4-weekly customers, 13 for 8-weekly), and orders the list by distance from the van's last completed job.

• Half way through a round in CF24, the top of the list is other CF24 houses marked same spot, then 1 km, 3 km and so on.
• Before the van has completed anything there is no position to measure from, so the list falls back to least-disruptive first and says so.
• Houses already missed today and customers with another clean due within days are excluded.

One press moves the customer in Jobber straight away.

What should the crew actually see?

A progress bar with the minimum and bonus lines on it, and a short message for their pace. No numbers to argue with, no spreadsheet. The office writes the messages for each pace (behind, on target, Bonus 1, Bonus 2), so the tone is theirs.

The crew's app should show today and nothing else: the round in stop order, whether each job is all-around or front-only, and four outcome buttons. Their own chat assistant can tell them how they are doing against target or whether they are on for a bonus, but deliberately cannot mark jobs for them, because the outcome buttons record the cleaner's location at the moment they press, and that protects them if anyone asks whether they were there.

The office gets the other side: pace alerts every couple of hours when a van is behind, and an end-of-day report of what was missed and why.

Frequently asked questions