Set business costs, team assumptions, and pricing defaults
Use business defaults to make quotes reflect how your cleaning business works. A realistic labor rate, crew assumption, and target margin are more useful than a price copied from another company.
Before you start
Sign in to retain synced defaults. Gather your usual cleaner cost, typical team size, owner participation, travel-pay policy, and minimum job price if you use one. Separate direct job costs from monthly business overhead.
Review your assumptions
- During Business setup, enter the cost of employing a cleaner for an hour, including the employment costs you need that rate to cover. A wage alone may understate your loaded labor cost.
- Set Typical team size to the number of people normally doing the work. Check it again when a particular job uses a different crew.
- Review Owner participation. Owner time has economic value even when you do not write yourself a separate paycheck for each job.
- Choose your Travel-pay policy and confirm the business base when using travel estimates. Check each job's location and travel assumptions.
- Set Target margin within the supported range, up to 50%, and, if applicable, Minimum job price. A minimum is a floor, not a flat price for every home.
- Save your defaults. Before calculating a quote, review the defaults in use and correct job-specific assumptions where needed.
For later changes, use Edit business defaults in the quote's business-defaults area. Quote settings contains business branding and customer-quote defaults, such as notes; it is a separate task from setting labor costs. Check job-specific inputs before each estimate.
What to expect
The quote uses modeled labor and other direct-cost assumptions to build a protected price. A configured target is an estimating guardrail, not a promise about your bank balance.
Illustration, not a customer result: two cleaners each cleaning for two hours produce four crew-hours. The crew is on site for two hours, but the business is paying for four hours of people's work. Changing crew size does not make the same amount of cleaning work disappear.
Monthly overhead, such as software or office expenses, is different from a job's direct cost. Avoid adding the same expense twice. A displayed job margin is not accounting profit after every business expense and tax.
Common questions
Should I enter zero labor cost because I work alone? No. Your own work still needs an economic value.
Will new defaults rewrite old quotes? Do not treat a defaults change as a correction to a historical customer agreement. Review and revise the particular quote when its scope or price needs changing.
When to contact support
Contact support if you cannot tell which assumptions a quote is using, saved defaults do not return, or owner participation produces an unexpected result. Include the inputs and expected behavior without unnecessary customer details.