Recurring schedules are easy. Rostering inside the award is the hard part.
Cleaning software is decided by three things: recurring schedules that survive a cancelled week, keeping the same cleaner on the same site, and rostering that stays inside the Cleaning Services Award — minimum shift lengths by floor area, broken-shift allowances and seven days’ notice of roster changes. Five products publish enough to compare. We have built against one.
Read this first: the award, not the app, sets the rules
Every scheduling product on this page will let you build a fortnightly clean at 6am. Not one of them will stop you building a roster that breaks the Cleaning Services Award 2020, and that is the cost that sinks a cleaning business — not the subscription.
The figures below are from the Fair Work Ombudsman’s pay guide effective 1 July 2026 and the award text itself, and they are what your roster has to satisfy whichever software you buy (Fair Work pay guide MA000022, published 24 June 2026; Cleaning Services Award 2020, read 3 September 2026).
We have a commercial interest to declare. Kindra sells Kindra Clean. It is not ranked here and it is not recommended here. For almost every cleaning business under about twenty staff, one of the products below plus a rostering tool that does award interpretation is the right answer, and a custom build is not. We build custom software and we still say that.
The award obligations your roster has to survive
These are the rules a cleaning roster has to satisfy. They are the durable part of this page; the product landscape below changes every year.
- #1Minimum shift length depends on the floor areaClause 13.5: a minimum of one hour if the employee is the only one engaged at a small stand-alone location up to 300 square metres; two consecutive hours at a location up to 2,000 square metres; three at 2,000 to 5,000; four at 5,000 or more. You pay the minimum even if the clean takes less (award text).
- #2Seven days’ notice to change a rosterClause 13.6(d) requires 7 days’ notice of a roster change except in an emergency. A scheduling tool that lets you drag a shift to tomorrow is letting you break the award, silently.
- #3A broken shift costs $4.71 a dayTwo periods of duty inside a 13-hour spread with more than an hour between them attracts $4.71 for the day, capped at $23.56 a week, from 1 July 2026 (pay guide). The classic morning-and-evening office clean is a broken shift.
- #4Before 6am or after 6pm is loadedLevel 1 full-time is $27.08 an hour; a shift starting before 6am or finishing after 6pm pays $31.14; a non-rotating shift finishing between midnight and 8am pays $35.20 (pay guide, 1 July 2026). Almost all commercial cleaning happens in the loaded window.
- #5Weekends multiply the rateLevel 1 full-time pays $40.62 on Saturday, $54.16 on Sunday and $67.70 on a public holiday; casuals attract 175%, 225% and 275% of the base under Table 7 (pay guide and award clause 20.2).
- #6Part-timers carry a 15% loadingThe Fair Work Ombudsman states part-time cleaners receive an additional 15% loading on their hourly rate and casuals 25% (FWO, Cleaning Award entitlements). Few generic scheduling tools know this loading exists.
Five products, on what they publish
Published facts only, read on 3 September 2026. Note the currency column carefully: three of the five price in US dollars and do not publish an Australian figure, which makes them harder to compare than their marketing suggests.
- #1ServiceM8 — the one we have built against; jobs and recurring schedules in AUD, no award logicFree for 30 jobs a month, then $29, $79, $149 and $349 a month including GST for 50, 150, 500 and 1,500-plus jobs, unlimited users; SMS 10 cents; card fees from 2.10% to 1.49% plus 30 cents (pricing). Free add-ons include Job Allocations for undated work, Route My Day and Track My Arrival (add-ons). Full public API. Implemented against, in production — integration page. The constraint: every recurring clean is a job, so a 400-site contract cleaner is on the top plan; and there is no award interpretation at all.
- #2Jobber — recurring residential work with GPS waypoints, priced only in US dollarsUS$49 a month for one user on Core, US$139 Connect, US$199 Grow, US$499 Plus, with five-, ten- and fifteen-user bands above that; "All prices in USD" on the Australian page; API access on Plus only, Zapier on all (Jobber pricing). GPS waypoints are captured at clock-in, clock-out and visit completion; live vehicle tracking needs FleetSharp devices (Jobber GPS). Documented, not implemented. The constraint: currency exposure and no Australian award logic.
- #3ZenMaid — the cheapest residential maid-service tool, US-builtUS$19 a month for up to 40 appointments, US$39 Pro for unlimited with Spotfinder for recurring customers and QuickBooks, US$49 Pro Max adding Mailchimp and Zapier; 14-day trial; "SMS charges not included"; Palo Alto, California (ZenMaid pricing). Documented, not implemented. The constraint: QuickBooks only, no Xero or MYOB, and payroll built for US employment.
- #4Swept — commercial and janitorial, metered on locations, CanadianFrom US$30 a month Launch, US$150 for the middle tier, US$225 Scale, all starting at 15 locations, 20% off annually; geofenced clock-in and GPS at clock in and out on the two upper plans; Halifax, Nova Scotia (Swept pricing). Documented, not implemented. The constraint: it is a site and time tool, not a quoting or invoicing tool, and no API or Zapier is published.
- #5Deputy — not a cleaning product; the rostering layer with award interpretation, in AUD$6.75, $8.75 and $13 per user per month in AUD excluding tax for Lite, Core and Pro; "Award Interpretation" on Lite and "Advanced Award Interpretation" on Core; a Deputy API is published; 30-day trial on add-ons (Deputy pricing). Documented, not implemented. The constraint: it rosters people and does not run jobs, quotes or invoices, so it sits beside one of the four above rather than replacing it.
Same cleaner, same site — why it is a rostering problem, not a scheduling one
Clients ask for the same cleaner. It is the single most common promise a cleaning business makes and the hardest to keep, because the person who keeps that promise is a roster, and a roster has to respect the award rules above at the same time.
A scheduling tool solves "when is the site cleaned". A rostering tool solves "who works when, and what does that cost". Only Deputy on this page publishes award interpretation; the other four publish scheduling. A twelve-staff commercial cleaner usually needs both, and the join between them — the schedule feeding the roster and the timesheet feeding payroll — is exactly where hours get re-keyed.
That join is what we do. Job scheduling describes it, and system glue describes the general case. What we do not do is write award interpretation. Deputy and the payroll platforms have teams on it and the rules change every July; you want a vendor carrying that, not a contractor.
Getting paid on a recurring contract
Recurring cleans should be recurring payments. Stripe’s standard Australian card fee is 1.7% plus $0.30 including GST for domestic cards and 3.5% plus $0.30 for international, with lower pricing flagged from 1 October 2026 (Stripe Australia, read 3 September 2026); ServiceM8 Pay runs from 2.10% down to 1.49% plus 30 cents by plan.
On a $600-a-month office contract that is roughly $10 to $13 a month in fees to remove a debtor from your list entirely. Most cleaning businesses we talk to are still emailing invoices and waiting. We have built against Stripe and it is the part of a cleaning setup that pays back fastest, which is why debtor chasing is usually the first thing we would build rather than anything clever.
What we have not assessed, and the compliance line
Four of the five products above as products. We have read their published pages and we have not rostered a cleaner in any of them, watched a supervisor use one at 5am, or seen what happens when a site cancels on a Thursday.
We are not employment lawyers and this is not award advice. The Fair Work Ombudsman runs compliance activity in contract cleaning focused on underpayment, sham contracting and supply chains (FWO, contract cleaning). Go to the award and the pay guide directly, and check anything a decision depends on with Fair Work or your own adviser.
If you want the twenty-minute version of "which of these fits us", a Leak Check is free and does not lead to a proposal about forty percent of the time.
The questions people actually ask.
01Why is a rostering tool in a list of cleaning software?
Because the award is where the money leaks, and none of the four cleaning products publish award interpretation. Deputy does, in AUD, and it sits beside a job tool rather than replacing it. Leaving it out would have made the list tidier and less useful.
02Jobber and ZenMaid are cheaper. Does US pricing matter?
It matters twice. Once because the Australian dollar moves and your subscription moves with it, and once because a US-built payroll or tax feature was built for US employment law. Neither is a reason not to buy — Jobber in particular is widely used here — but price it at today’s rate plus a margin, and do not expect it to know what a broken shift is.
03Would Kindra Clean be better for us?
Probably not. It exists for a cleaning business whose process genuinely does not fit a product — multi-site contracts with client-specific compliance reporting is the usual case. If you are under about twenty staff, one of the products above with Deputy or a payroll platform doing the award is cheaper, better tested and better supported. We would rather build you the joins between those than sell you a replacement.
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