Planning 4-Weekly and 8-Weekly Window Cleaning Rounds on One 8-Week Cycle

Why plan on an 8-week cycle?

Because 8 weeks is the shortest period in which every customer, 4-weekly and 8-weekly, comes round a whole number of times. A 4-weekly customer is cleaned in week 1 and week 5. An 8-weekly customer is cleaned once. Plan the 8 weeks as one block and every day of the cycle has a known set of houses on it.

That gives you a baseline: Tuesday of week 3, Van 2 does these streets. Once the baseline exists, the daily questions get small. Is this day full enough? Who can be pulled forward? Where does a new customer fit? Without it, every day is planned from nothing.

How do you build set work per van per day?

1. Start from territories. Each van owns its postcodes. See the territory guide.
2. Give each postcode a day in the cycle. CF83 is a Tuesday for Van 3, for example. Neighbouring postcodes go on the same or adjacent days.
3. Place each customer on their postcode's day, in week 1 to 4 for 4-weekly customers (repeating in weeks 5 to 8), and anywhere in weeks 1 to 8 for 8-weekly customers, spreading them so no single week is overloaded.
4. Check capacity per day, not job count. Thirty front-only cleans is a much lighter day than thirty all-around cleans. See measuring capacity in points.
5. Import the baseline once, then maintain it. The company I built for laid out 8 weeks of set work before moving to Jobber, so the system started from a clean, deliberate plan rather than history.

How far can a job move before it changes the customer's cycle?

Set explicit limits. Moving a 4-weekly customer a few days is tidying a day. Moving them two weeks is changing their service. In the live system the limits are up to 6 days early for a 4-weekly customer and 13 days for an 8-weekly customer when pulling work forward to fill a short day.

Two more guards matter:

• Never pull forward someone with another clean due within days, or they get cleaned twice in a week.
• Never pull forward a house that was already missed today. The crew could not get in this morning; sending them back this afternoon wastes the trip.

Where should new customers go?

Into the soonest day a van is genuinely working in their area, which on an 8-week cycle also tends to fill the lighter weeks. When the company I built for takes a quote at the door, the first clean is booked automatically on that day and shown to the customer straight away, rather than the cleaner picking a date.

The trap is the late weeks. Weeks one and two fill naturally because that is where everyone looks. Weeks five to eight quietly stay light. A good system reports gaps by week, van and area so the office can see which future days need work, rather than discovering a thin Thursday on the Wednesday night.

How does the cycle keep running without daily rebuilding?

Completing a visit books the next one automatically on the customer's own cycle. Missed visits move by the round rule. Anything left at the end of the day is moved on automatically. Short days get topped up from nearby future work. Put together, the 8-week baseline stays intact without anyone rebuilding worklists by hand each evening, which was the whole point.

The missed visits guide covers the parts that move work, and the targets guide covers how a day knows it is full.

Frequently asked questions