Shift planning tool replaces a shared spreadsheet at a cleaning firm

Situation

A commercial cleaning company based in the Gallus district of Frankfurt, 45 staff, most of them part-time, about €2.1 million in annual revenue. It cleans offices and stairwells at around 70 sites between Gallus, Bockenheim and Höchst. The weekly plan lived in one Excel file on a shared drive. The dispatcher spent Thursday afternoon and most of Friday morning on it, about six hours a week. Cleaners received their shifts as a photo of the spreadsheet on WhatsApp.

Three or four times a month a site went uncleaned because two people had edited the file at the same time, or because a swap agreed by phone never reached the sheet. Hours were written on paper slips and typed into a second spreadsheet for payroll at month end, which took the office about two days.

Two agencies had quoted a full workforce-management platform at €35,000 to €60,000 with a monthly licence. The owner wanted the one thing that hurt fixed, and wanted to own the result.

Approach

One workflow, two roles, no integrations. That was the scope, and it fit the entry tier at €9,500. The dispatcher plans in a browser on a weekly grid of sites and people, with a warning when a person is booked twice or a site has no one. The cleaner opens a link on a phone, sees the week, confirms each shift with one tap, and enters start and end time on the day. Swaps are requested in the tool and approved by the dispatcher, so the plan is always the plan.

At month end the office exports one file with hours per person, which the payroll office imports. An export file keeps the price in the entry tier. A live connection to the payroll system would have been the next tier.

We built it as a plain web application: a database, a small server, and a mobile-friendly front end, hosted on a German cloud provider at about €40 a month, paid by the client. Week one produced a clickable version with the client’s real sites and people. Week three ran in parallel with the spreadsheet. Week five was handover, with the source code in the client’s own repository and a two-page runbook.

Result

In this scenario the dispatcher’s planning time fell from about 6 hours to about 1.5 hours per week. Missed shifts from planning errors dropped from three or four a month to zero or one. Month-end payroll preparation fell from about two days to about half a day. Cleaners no longer phone in on Monday to ask where they are. The company owns the code outright and pays no licence.

What it cost

€9,500 fixed price, quoted before the work started, for one workflow with two user roles and a monthly export file. Hosting at about €40 a month is a third-party cost, paid by the client and excluded from the guarantee. The build is covered by our 100% money-back guarantee: full refund on request within 14 days of delivery, and for a monthly retainer the first month is refundable in full.

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