CarpetBossPro Blog — Commercial & Property Managers

School Carpet Cleaning: Breaks, Summer Work and Many Rooms on One Account

Schools are a carpet cleaner's busiest commercial account for a few weeks a year and one of the quietest the rest of the time. Most of the real work happens when the students are gone: summer break, winter break, spring break. During the school year, it is usually a handful of offices, a library and the occasional emergency in a kindergarten classroom.

Schools Run on the Academic Calendar

Churches schedule around services and events, as covered in Church Carpet Cleaning Accounts: Working Around Services and Events. Schools schedule around the academic calendar, which is more predictable but much more compressed.

This guide covers private schools, preschools, daycares and charter schools as well as public schools. The common thread is lots of rooms, tight windows, and a facilities person who wants every room accounted for.

Buildings as Addresses, Rooms on the Job

In CarpetBossPro, the school or district is one client. Each building or campus is an address under that client. A small private school might be one address; a district might have an address for each campus.

Within each address, the carpet job details list what is being cleaned: offices, hallways, classrooms by count, a library, a staff lounge. Record the square feet, the number of rooms, the carpet type (often Commercial Low-Pile in classrooms, sometimes something softer in a library reading area) and the method. When the school wants different parts of a campus on different schedules — the front office monthly, classrooms over summer only — split them into separate addresses so each comes due on its own.

A new job at an address fills in from its last job. So the summer cleaning this year starts with everything you recorded last summer.

Planning the Summer Push

Summer work is a big block of rooms in a short window, often across several buildings. Planning it a few weeks out makes all the difference:

• Get the dates. Ask the facilities office when the building is empty, when floors are being waxed in hallways, and when teachers come back.
• Walk through first. Confirm the room count and note anything new: a classroom converted to an office, a wing that was re-carpeted.
• Put it on the board early. Schedule the school jobs on the dispatch board for the vans that will do the work, so residential jobs fill in around them.
• Plan by building. Each address on its own day or days. The Waiting List map shows the campuses, so the office can group nearby buildings.

Recurring Visits During the Year

During the school year, smaller recurring visits keep the busiest areas presentable: front offices, the library, staff areas. Set those up with minimum days between visits, such as 30 or 90 days, and they will come due on the Waiting List on their own. Because the count starts from the last completed visit, a visit that slides because of a school event does not throw off the next one.

Over winter and spring breaks, the office can pull due areas forward to make use of the empty building.

Many Rooms, One Checklist

On big school jobs, the checklist on the tech app keeps track of what was done. The tech records the rooms cleaned on each visit, the estimated dry time, any stains that did not come out, the condition and a note. For a building with forty classrooms, “rooms cleaned” is what tells the facilities office whether every room got done or whether a few were locked.

Before-and-after photos of a few typical rooms and any problem spots give the school a record of the work. A condition of Repair recommended with a photo of a torn seam in a busy hallway is useful information for their maintenance budget.

Access, Keys and the Night Custodian

Schools usually have a head custodian who controls access. Put the contact, the entrance, the parking spot for the van and where to run the hose in the access notes on each address. If the school has rules about who can be in the building, note those too, and follow them. Techs sign in to the tech app with a personal PIN, and the time clock records when they were on site, which helps if the school asks.

Billing a School

Schools and districts almost always pay through their own approval process. Monthly billing fits well: one statement each month covering every building cleaned, with each line labeled by address. If the school uses purchase orders, record the number in a custom field on the client. Invoices carry line items and sales tax, and the school can pay online or through its own process.

Reliable in the Busy Weeks

The school that sees you show up on time, finish every room during the break and send one clear statement afterward is likely to call you again next summer. For scheduling these accounts alongside the rest of your work, see One Van on Homes, One on Commercial After Hours: Splitting the Dispatch Board. For the rest of the commercial tools, visit the CarpetBossPro commercial carpet cleaning software page.