Outsourced back office for commercial cleaning companies
Dull takes the repetitive office work of a janitorial or commercial cleaning company off your plate: invoicing every site, keeping job costs current, following up on overdue accounts and entering supplier bills. It is done for you, in your own tools, and a person checks every exception.
Cleaning companies run on thin margins and a lot of paperwork. Every building you clean creates invoices, timesheets, supply costs and compliance requests. When the office seat is empty, that work lands on the owner or the operations manager, usually at night.
The back-office work in a cleaning company
Most of the office work is the same every week. It follows rules, and it lives in a handful of tools. That makes it a good fit to hand off.
| Task | What it involves | Where it usually lives |
|---|---|---|
| Contract invoicing | Monthly invoices for each site, plus extra work orders, floor jobs and one-off cleans added on top. | QuickBooks Online or Xero |
| Vendor portal uploads | Facility clients often want invoices uploaded to their own portal with a PO number and proof of service. | Client portals such as Coupa or SAP Ariba |
| Job costing | Labor hours and supplies recorded against each site, so you can see which contracts actually make money. | Spreadsheets, QuickBooks classes or a scheduling app such as Jobber or Swept |
| Timesheet entry | Crew hours collected from paper sheets, texts or an app, checked and keyed into payroll for you to review. | Your payroll system |
| AR follow-up | Reminders and statements for overdue accounts, on a fixed schedule. | Email and your accounting software |
| Supplier bills | Chemical, paper and equipment invoices entered as bills, ready for you to approve and pay. | QuickBooks Online or Xero |
| Compliance paperwork | Certificates of insurance, W-9s and new-vendor forms that clients ask for before you start or renew. | Email and shared folders |
What happens when the office seat is empty
The cleaning still gets done, because crews show up. The office work is what slips, and it slips quietly.
- Invoices go out late. A monthly contract invoiced ten days late means cash arrives ten days late, every month, until someone catches up.
- Portal invoices bounce. A missing PO number or proof of service gets an invoice rejected, and nobody notices until the client’s payment run has passed.
- Extra work goes unbilled. One-off cleans and add-on requests are easy to forget when nobody owns billing.
- Overdue accounts age. Collections is the first job to stop, because nothing breaks right away.
- Job costs go stale. Without current numbers you can’t tell which buildings to reprice at renewal.
We know this from the inside. CleanSL8, our own cleaning company in London, is where the system that became Dull was first built. For a long time its invoices and follow-ups were done at the end of the day, after the real work.
What Dull takes on
- Sending contract and extra-work invoices on the schedule you set, with the right site, PO number and attachments.
- Uploading invoices to client portals and telling you when one is rejected, and why.
- Recording labor hours and supply costs against each site for job costing.
- Collecting crew hours and keying them into payroll for your review, with anything odd flagged.
- Written reminders and statements for overdue accounts, plus a short list of the ones that need your call.
- Entering supplier bills so they are ready for you to approve.
- Gathering the certificates, W-9s and vendor forms clients ask for.
Anything unclear is set aside, reviewed by a person and sent to you with the reason and the question. Nothing is guessed. Every Friday you get a short summary: what got done, what is waiting on you and anything blocked.
What stays with you
Some work should stay with the owner. In the standard pilot, Dull does not:
- Make payments or move money. You approve and pay every bill.
- Run payroll or file taxes. We enter hours; you review and run payroll.
- Make approval decisions, such as credits, refunds or write-offs.
- Handle card numbers.
- Call your clients. We write; you make the calls that need a person.
Hire, temp or hand it off
Hiring is the usual answer, and sometimes the right one. It helps to know what it costs. A bookkeeping, accounting or auditing clerk earned a median of $49,210 a year in May 2024, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Wages are only about 70% of what private employers spend per hour worked; benefits make up the rest (BLS, June 2026). And SHRM puts the average cost per hire at nearly $4,700, before anyone has been trained.
Dull is month to month. You can use it to cover the seat while you hire, or instead of hiring. To see the numbers for your own business, try the empty seat calculator.
How it starts
- A 15-minute call. Tell us which work is piling up. We’ll tell you straight whether we can take it on.
- Day one. We need a login with only the access the job needs, about 20 real examples with the correct entries, your rules (“always…”, “never…”) and one named person to answer questions.
- Shadow first. We run alongside your current process and you approve everything. Once you’re happy, we take the work over.
- The pilot. The first 30 days cover up to 300 standard records a month. Then continue monthly, add a second process, or stop.
Not ready to talk? Run a free back-office check and we’ll send a one-page plan for your business.
Frequently asked questions
No. We can key timesheet hours into your payroll system and flag anything that looks wrong, but you review and run payroll yourself. Payroll and tax filings are outside what we do.
Not in the standard pilot. We send written reminders and statements on the schedule you set, and hand you a short list of the accounts that need a call from you.
Yes, if you give us a login for each portal. We upload invoices with the right PO numbers and attachments, and tell you when a portal rejects one and why.
Your own tools. That is usually QuickBooks Online or Xero, a scheduling app, spreadsheets and your email. We don't ask you to switch anything.
A flat monthly fee, month to month, with no long-term contract. You get a fixed quote on a 15-minute call. It covers up to 300 standard records a month, with a person reviewing every exception.