Time tracking in the cleaning sector: mobile teams on multiple sites
In most sectors, everyone works at a single address. Not in cleaning. A crew of eight can cover six different buildings in one evening, on part-time contracts, with shifting start times and a driver who picks up colleagues along the way. That is exactly why time tracking in the cleaning sector is both the trickiest and the most rewarding piece of HR administration you can tackle.
Why cleaning is a special case
Three characteristics set it apart from a factory or a shop:
- No fixed workplace. The employee does not come to you, but to the client. A clocking terminal at your own gate is therefore useless for most of your staff.
- Lots of part-time contracts. Two hours in the morning at an office building, three hours in the evening at a school. Part-time work brings extra recording obligations with it (more on that below).
- Travel between sites. The time between two assignments is not a break, and it is not ordinary home-to-work commuting either. That has consequences for what you pay out.
Anyone trying to track this with paper site sheets spends hours every month deciphering, recounting and correcting after the fact. And a correction after the fact is precisely what an inspection does not like to see.
Which hours actually count?
For Joint Committee 121 (cleaning), specific sector agreements apply to travel. Two principles matter when setting up your time tracking:
- Travel from the registered office or a meeting point to the site is compensated in the sector through a mobility allowance, proportional to the distance covered in kilometres.
- Employees without a fixed workplace or without fixed working hours who serve several immediately consecutive sites in cascade are paid their hourly wage from the start of the first site to the end of the last site.
That second point is where most calculation errors arise. A crew that starts at 5 p.m. on site A, leaves for site B at 6.30 p.m. and finishes at 8 p.m. does not have 2h45 of "worked" time with a gap in between: paid working time runs from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. If you only record the hours at each site, you structurally underestimate your wage cost and you underpay your people.
The exact amounts and exceptions (window cleaners, waste collection, industrial cleaning) are set out in the sector collective labour agreements. What you need is a recording system that can distinguish between time on site and time travelling between sites. Without that distinction, you can neither pay correctly nor invoice the client correctly.
Part-time work: the forgotten obligation
If you employ part-time staff on a variable work schedule, you must be able to demonstrate which hours were actually worked. The FPS Employment, Labour and Social Dialogue summarises this in its guidance on monitoring the working hours of part-time employees: the normal work schedule must be known through publication, and any deviations from it must be recorded and kept.
In practice, that means three things for a cleaning company:
- The individual work schedules of part-timers are published before the work starts, within the notice period set out in your work rules or sector CLA.
- Every deviation (starting an hour earlier, stepping in at an extra site, a cancelled assignment) is recorded — not at the end of the month, but at the moment itself.
- The record is consultable at the place of employment, which with dozens of sites is only realistic if it is digital and centralised.
If you use a time tracking system that meets the legal conditions, that follow-up becomes considerably simpler. If you do it on paper, you have by definition as many registers as you have sites.
Paper site sheet vs. digital time tracking
| Paper site sheet | Digital time tracking |
|---|---|
| Filled in afterwards, often from memory | Time stamp at the moment itself |
| Collected at month-end closing | Visible to the planner in real time |
| Travel time estimated | Start of first site and end of last site exact |
| Deviations hard to trace back | Deviation flagged automatically against the schedule |
| Retyping into Excel for payroll | Direct export to the payroll provider |
The gain is not only compliance. A mid-sized cleaning company with 60 employees that loses five minutes per person per week to paperwork and corrections quickly loses more than 200 hours of administration per year. That is almost a full month of work for one office employee.
The direction of travel is clear, too: recording is becoming increasingly digital and auditable. We wrote about it at length in why every HR department wins with digital time tracking.
How do you record hours on site without a clocking terminal?
Four approaches are the most common in the sector. They are not mutually exclusive — many companies combine them.
- Mobile app with geolocation when clocking in and out. The most flexible option, and it works for one-off assignments too. Communicate transparently about what you record; location data is personal data.
- QR code or NFC tag on site. The employee scans on arrival and departure. Cheap, simple, and it proves someone was physically present.
- Badge terminal at large fixed clients. Worth it from a certain volume of hours per week on the same site.
- Crew registration by the team leader. One person clocks in the whole crew. Practical for cascade work, but put in writing who is responsible for accuracy.
Pick one method per client segment and stay consistent. Nothing makes payroll processing as expensive as four recording methods that each export differently.
From time tracking to planning, payroll and invoicing
Recording hours is not an end in itself. The real gain comes when the same hours are reused three times:
- Feedback into the planning. Someone who structurally takes 20 minutes longer on site C does not have a discipline problem but a badly estimated quote. Compare planned versus actual hours per site, not per employee.
- Payroll processing. Hours worked, travel time, mobility allowance and any premiums for evening or night work flow through to the payroll provider. Less retyping, fewer corrections after the fact.
- Invoicing and margin per site. Only when you know how many hours a contract really costs do you know whether that client is profitable.
In Forganiser, planning, time tracking and personnel administration all run off the same data, including the Dimona declarations for temporary workers, students and stand-ins who step in at the last minute.
Rolling it out in five steps
- Map your sites. Address, contact person, planned hours, type of work (fixed, cascade, one-off).
- Set the ground rules in your work rules. Which recording method, which publication deadline for work schedules, how deviations are approved. Also check what is allowed for last-minute changes in our article on changing a work schedule.
- Start with one region or one crew. Four weeks of piloting delivers more than three months of meetings.
- Train the team leaders, not just HR. They determine whether the recording happens at the right moment.
- Evaluate on figures. How many deviations per week? How many manual corrections at payroll closing? Those two numbers tell you everything about the quality of your system.
Three mistakes to avoid
- Recording only the hours on site. You miss the travel time between consecutive sites and therefore pay incorrectly.
- Processing deviations only at month-end closing. At that point, the record is no longer a control tool but a reconstruction.
- Introducing geolocation without communicating. Explain what you record, why, and how long you keep it. Transparency costs you one briefing; mistrust costs you people.
Get those three things right and you immediately gain a far better view of your staffing levels — and of the margin per site. In a sector with tight margins, that is not a luxury but the heart of the matter.