Automating time tracking in cleaning services: site by site

Published on 26 October 2026

In most sectors the working day starts and ends at a single address. Not in cleaning. A cleaning operative does a bank branch in the morning, drives on to a GP's practice, and finishes at an SME office around the corner. Three sites, three start and stop moments, two journeys in between — multiplied by a hundred staff.

That is why time tracking in the cleaning sector is not a detail of payroll administration, but the backbone of your entire operation. Companies that still do it manually with paper timesheets per site lose hours to re-typing data and run a real risk during an inspection. Below you'll read what exactly you need to register, where things go wrong, and how to automate it step by step.

Why cleaning is a special case

Four characteristics make this sector harder than, say, a production department:

Working on the client's premises. There is no clocking terminal at the door and the supervisor is usually not there.
Short, fragmented shifts. Many contracts run to 15 to 25 hours a week, spread across several locations and at the edges of the day.
Variable working schedules. A new site, a colleague off sick or a client changing its opening hours, and the schedule shifts.
Travel between sites. That time and cost follow separate sector rules, so they can't simply be thrown in with hours worked.

That last point alone causes monthly discussions between planner, employee and payroll in many companies.

What exactly do you register? Keep three categories apart

1. Working time on site

This is the core: the actual start and finish time per site. Not one total per day, but per location. That way you can check afterwards how many hours went into a client contract, and whether your quote still matches reality.

2. Travel between sites

In Joint Committee 121 (cleaning) there is a separate arrangement for blue-collar workers serving consecutive sites: there is an allowance for the travel cost and an allowance for the time needed to get from one site to the next. Important: that inter-site journey is compensated, but under the sector rules it does not count as working time. Conditions apply too — the sites must be a minimum distance apart and there must not be too much time between the two shifts — and certain groups (such as window cleaners) are excluded. The exact amounts are index-linked and change regularly; check the current sector sheet from FPS Employment for JC 121 or ask your payroll agency.

The practical consequence for your registration: your system must be able to log journeys separately, with kilometres and means of transport, apart from hours worked.

3. Minimum shift length

The Labour Act assumes in principle that every working period lasts at least three hours, but sectors may deviate from this. In cleaning, the minimum shift is set at one hour, which may be spread over several directly consecutive sites.

A concrete example: an operative cleans a bank branch from 1.00 pm to 1.45 pm, a small office from 1.55 pm to 2.30 pm and a technical room from 2.35 pm to 3.00 pm. That is 45 + 35 + 25 = 105 minutes of time actually worked, but it is settled as two full hours, so 120 minutes.

Anyone recalculating that by hand across 80 employees will make mistakes. A system that has the rule set up correctly once will not.

Part-time schedules: publication and deviations

Because cleaning leans heavily on part-time contracts with variable schedules, there is an extra obligation on top. Variable working schedules for part-time employees must in principle be published at least seven working days in advance. Sector-level collective agreements can adjust that deadline, so check what applies in your case.

You must also be able to demonstrate deviations from the agreed schedule. Classically that is done via a deviation register, but a time tracking system that records the start and finish time of every shift and can be consulted largely takes over that role. You can read more about the difference between the agreed schedule and what actually happens in working schedule vs actual roster.

From 2027: registering becomes the norm

The federal government has announced that from 1 January 2027 employers must have a system in place to register hours worked. This follows European case law obliging member states to impose an objective, reliable and accessible system. A traditional clocking terminal is not required — an app or digital registration will do, as long as it is objective and can be consulted. Exactly what will end up in the legislation is still being worked out; we set out the background in this article on the obligation from 2027.

For cleaning companies this is less a shock than a nudge: most already work with timesheets or site logbooks. The difference lies in the form, not in the principle.

Automating in five steps

1. Map your sites and standard shifts. Per client location: how many hours, which days, which time window, which employee is the regular and which the backup. This is immediately the basis for your staff planning.

2. Have people register on site, not afterwards. A check-in via smartphone with location verification, or a QR code on the supply cupboard, gives you a timestamp nobody has to reconstruct in the evening. Important: communicate clearly what you register and why, and keep it limited to what you need for pay and working time.

3. Compare planned with performed. The real gain is not in the registration itself, but in the difference. A site that structurally costs 20 minutes more than quoted becomes visible after one month instead of after one year.

4. Automate the sector rules. Minimum shift length, inter-site travel, supplements for evening or weekend work: these are calculation rules, not judgement calls. Have them set up correctly once and applied to every line.

5. Close the chain all the way to payroll. Registered hours that you still have to re-type into a performance file are only half the job. A direct export to your payroll agency removes most errors. How that ties in with the rest of your HR administration and your personnel management is often the biggest time saving of the whole exercise.

Three pitfalls

Lumping everything together. Working time, travel time and waiting time each have their own rules. One total figure per day makes your registration worthless in a dispute or an inspection.
Registering only for the payslip. Use the same data for site profitability and your quotes too. Otherwise you're paying for administration without getting management information in return.
Forgetting the employees. People who have to check in and out at every site also want to see their own hours and balance. Transparency is not an extra here; it saves dozens of phone calls a month.

Start small, but start structurally

You don't have to switch a hundred sites over at once. Pick one region or one team, let them register digitally for a month, and compare the result with the paper timesheets. That comparison will immediately show you where your margin is leaking: unbilled extras, badly estimated sites, or journeys that were never compensated correctly.

You'll find more on planning and registration in your sector on the cleaning and facility services page.