Margins Are Tight. Are You Tracking the Right Things?

Margins in cleaning are under pressure.
Wages are up.
Client expectations are up.
Compliance requirements are up.
Insurance, fuel and consumables are up.

But many companies still measure performance using the same old metrics.

• Revenue per contract.
• Overall hours delivered.
• Top-level complaints.

Useful? Yes.
Enough? Not even close.
Because none of those metrics tell you where profit is quietly leaking.

The data that actually protects your margin
If you want to protect profitability, you need operational visibility at site level. Not just what a contract earns, but how it behaves day to day.

You need to know:

• Where overtime is creeping in without being noticed
• Which sites regularly miss tasks and require rework
• Where attendance patterns are slipping and causing reactive cover
• Which contracts generate the highest volume of reactive visits
• How much management time each site actually consumes

Without this level of detail, you’re guessing. And guessing in a low-margin industry is expensive.

A contract might look healthy on paper. But if it’s constantly requiring reactive visits, extra supervisor time and overtime to stay afloat, your margin is being quietly eroded.

The danger of managing by feel
A lot of cleaning businesses rely on experience and instinct. And to be fair, that experience is valuable. Many MDs and Ops Directors know their contracts inside out.

But when you’re scaling, juggling dozens of sites or bidding for new work, instinct isn’t enough.

You need structured data that shows trends early. For example, if attendance dips on a site for three consecutive weeks, that’s not a coincidence. If overtime consistently appears at month-end, there’s a planning issue. If complaints spike after supervisor visits reduce, there’s a correlation worth understanding. Clear dashboards and site-level data allow you to see these patterns before they hit your margin. Instead of reacting to problems, you anticipate them.

From reactive to controlled

• When you track the right operational data, you can:
  Adjust staffing levels before overtime spirals
• Rebalance contracts that are consuming disproportionate management time
• Identify training gaps linked to repeated audit failures
• Support underperforming sites before clients escalate

That level of control directly protects profitability.

The companies that thrive in tight markets aren’t necessarily bigger or cheaper. They’re just more informed and more disciplined in how they manage performance.

Facility Apps helps bring that visibility together - not in ten disparate systems, but in one joined-up operational view. Because if you don’t know where your margin’s leaking, you can’t fix it.

And in today’s cleaning market, you can’t afford not to know.