Missed Window Cleans: How to Stop Skipped Houses Costing You Money

Why do missed visits leak money?

Because the default outcome of a missed house is nothing. The cleaner moves on, the job sits on a day that has finished, and unless someone remembers it, the customer is not seen until their next cycle or ever. For a 4-weekly customer that is a lost clean. For an 8-weekly customer it is four months between visits, and a good chance they find someone else.

Two more costs hide behind that:

• The van misses its target. Every skip is a point off the day unless something fills it.
• Nobody knows why. Was the gate locked, or did the crew run out of time? Without a recorded reason the office cannot tell a one-off from a pattern.

What should a cleaner press when they cannot do a house?

One of two buttons, each with a reason.

Either one asks why, from a short list of reasons plus an optional note. The office sees it. So does the next cleaner: when that job comes round again it shows an amber note saying when it was missed, why, and where it was moved from, so they know before they knock.

Location is recorded at the moment either button is pressed. That is there to protect the cleaner, not to police them: if a customer says nobody came, the answer is on the job.

Where should a missed job go?

To the next day a van is genuinely back in that postcode, not to tomorrow. Tomorrow is usually a different patch, so "tomorrow" means a special trip for one house. The round rule looks forward day by day for the first day with a real cluster of jobs in the same postcode (at least five, and preferably in the same few streets), ignoring jobs that only landed there because of other misses.

If the round is not back within 14 days, Miss Today refuses rather than inventing a date, and tells the cleaner to use Miss This Cycle or ring the office. Refusing is the right behaviour; a confident wrong date is worse than an honest "not possible".

The territory guide explains the round rule in full.

What happens to jobs nobody pressed a button on?

They are moved on automatically at the end of the day. Crews do not always press Miss Today on the last one or two they did not reach. Without a sweep, those jobs sit on yesterday and go stale.

In the live system, every evening at 17:30 anything still not completed is moved by the same round rule. It never touches completed work. Each job gets a line saying where it went and why, and that same sentence appears on the job card when it comes round again. If one job will not move, for example because Jobber refused the change, that line goes red for a human and the rest still move. A full day of around 250 jobs takes about seven minutes, paced deliberately so Jobber is never overloaded.

Because nobody is watching at 17:30, the sweep has one difference from Miss Today: if a job has no round day inside the fortnight, it goes to the next day rather than being left late.

What if a whole van goes off the road?

Clear the van's remaining day in one action. A breakdown at 9am should not wait for 17:30. The office presses Reschedule day on the van, sees a preview of how many jobs will move and how many are already completed and staying put, and chooses either "back onto their rounds" (the round rule again) or "all on one day I pick" when they know when the crew can get back out.

How do you fill the gap a miss leaves?

From nearby future work, within limits. The van's top-up list offers houses that can be pulled forward, nearest to where the van is standing first, and it excludes anyone already missed today so the crew is not sent back to a gate that was locked an hour ago. The office can also stop a miss from refilling the day automatically when they would rather leave the space.

A word of caution on the customer side: offering freed slots to nearby customers by text is tempting, but reminders that make cancelling easy can create more gaps than they fill. Decide that policy deliberately before automating it.

What should the office see?

A skipped count on every day, and a list behind it. The day view's footer shows skipped next to completed and late, and opening it lists who, where and the reason given. An end-of-day missed-visit report goes to the manager. Patterns jump out quickly: the same street every cycle, the same reason, the same van.

Frequently asked questions