ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION
Automating efficiency
Marius Stäcker, CEO of ToolTime, explains how back-office automation can help drive efficiencies and growth for SMEs in the cleaning sector.
Back in 2021, there were a record 69,005 registered cleaning businesses in the UK, and in 2023 the British Cleaning Council reported the industry to be worth £59bn, employing 1.47m people. The outlook for the industry is positive and continuing to grow, with YouGov research confirming that a record number of UK households are paying to have their home cleaned.
Trends in the healthcare industry continue towards further outsourcing of cleaning services, whilst rising numbers of businesses returning to the office may also account for cleaners’ busy schedules. So, there’s no shortage of work, but what’s next for small cleaning businesses?
If the aim is to keep building competitive advantage, improving the customer experience and lowering costs, there can only be one answer – digitisation. For any business that wants to grow, it’s important to become more efficient from an administrative perspective. Ultimately, it’s about spending more time doing the work that brings in revenue and builds reputation, not getting bogged down by back-office tasks.
The challenge
Small businesses in the more traditional trades like the cleaning industry have fallen well behind when it comes to digitisation. Many small business owners continue to rely on pen, paper and basic computer software such as Word and Excel to run their businesses. Although initially a perfectly efficient way to do things, these methods have become quite severely outdated – not to mention being harder to scale when business ramps up.
Not only does manual recording of invoices, quotes, receipts, customer details and more take much more time, but it makes it easier to lose track of critical information and lengthens the tax returns process. On top of this, tedious administrative tasks take a toll on the individual. Burnout is common among small business owners, and factors like the cost-of-living crisis create added pressure to retain and gain customers.
46 | TOMORROW'S CLEANING
Back-office administration eats into business owners’ downtime, with the 9-5 reserved for completing jobs, not managing things like job scheduling, invoicing and timesheets. This has become a roadblock for growth, with small business owners often running at max capacity and leaving customers waiting for paperwork. Larger companies with far more resources have driven customer expectations for faster and cheaper services through the roof, and SMEs are expected to keep up.
The solution
We all know that running a small business is a labour of love – but this doesn’t have to mean business owners sacrifice a healthy work-life balance, or that onboarding digital tools has to be expensive or difficult. New cloud-based applications mean workflows can be incorporated into the system quickly, without fuss, and can be accessed from anywhere, on any device. Standardising documentation makes it easier to identify anomalies, and storing job notes centrally means that offering a tailored customer experience comes naturally.
By digitising and automating back-office processes, those running small and medium cleaning businesses can achieve huge gains in efficiency, costs, speed and transparency to achieve growth and build resilience in the face of skilled worker shortages, inflation and supply chain issues. By ensuring that external-facing assets such as websites and social media channels are up to date, businesses have a better chance of standing out from competitors and appealing to young talent.
It's these gains that make increasing accessibility to digital job management and accounting tools so critical. Luckily for small business owners, application development has been advancing rapidly, bringing the costs down, whilst user-interfaces have become more intuitively designed than ever before. The bottom line is that digital tools are creating an immediate return on investment for small businesses that can no longer be ignored.
www.tooltime.app/uk twitter.com/TomoCleaning
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