Window cleaning has a payment problem shaped like nothing else in the trades. A builder chases one £5,000 invoice. You chase three hundred £15 ones. Every four or six weeks the whole round regenerates itself, and if even a tenth of customers drift into I-will-pay-you-next-time territory, you are working a full day each month for free. Any window cleaner app in the UK worth installing has to start from that reality: tiny amounts, huge volume, forever.
The round is a machine for creating tiny invoices
Fifty houses a day at £12 to £20 each is six hundred quid of work and fifty separate payment events. Some pay cash on the day, some transfer that evening, some transfer eventually, and some genuinely forget for three cleans running. None of them are bad people. But the arithmetic is brutal: at £15 a clean, twenty forgetful customers is £300 floating loose at any moment, and unlike a builder you cannot spend an hour chasing each one, because the chase would cost more than the debt.
The only workable system is one where recording the clean and recording the payment take seconds, because you will do each of them thousands of times a year.
Leave the gate open: the customer notes that run the round
Every established round runs on a private encyclopaedia. Number 34 leaves the side gate unlocked but the dog must not get out. The bungalow on Crescent Road wants a knock first. Number 7 pays for their elderly neighbour at number 9. The new people at 52 said skip the conservatory roof in winter. Lose that knowledge and you lose the round's real value; it is exactly what you are buying when you buy a round from a retiring cleaner.
Most of it lives in your head, which works until you take on help, sell up, or simply forget which house had the broken latch you promised to be careful with. Getting those notes out of your head and attached to each job record is one of the highest-value admin habits in this trade. We wrote more generally about that discipline in building a paper trail by text.
Chasing £15 without making it weird
The awkwardness is real: these are people whose gardens you stand in every month, who wave at you from the kitchen. Nobody wants to be the cleaner who got sharp about fifteen quid. A few things take the sting out:
- Send a message the same evening, every time, to everyone. Windows done today, £15 as usual, bank details below. When it is routine and universal, it is not a chase, it is a receipt.
- Reference the count, not the customer. That is the last two cleans, £30 total, reads as bookkeeping. You keep not paying me does not.
- Make paying trivially easy. The right details in every message, so nobody has to text back asking for your sort code again.
- Know your numbers before you knock. Half the awkwardness is uncertainty. If your records say two cleans unpaid, you can say it kindly and confidently.
Logging jobs per street, per day
A surprisingly powerful habit: at the end of each street, log what you actually did. Cleaned 12 on Marsh Lane, skipped 18, no access at 25, conservatory extra at 31. It takes one message worth of effort and it turns end-of-month invoicing from archaeology into a list you already have. It also settles the classic dispute, when a customer swears you did not come in March, with a dated record instead of a shrug.
Where GraftG fits, honestly
This is where GraftG comes in, and it is worth being straight about what it is. GraftG is not round-scheduling software; it will not plan your route or tell you which street is due. What it does, and does inside WhatsApp with no app to download, is the part above: you text one number to log the jobs you cleaned, send invoices, record which payments have landed, and keep receipts and mileage in the same place. A job log and invoicing engine that works from the pavement, by message, with your customer notes attached to the record. It is coming soon, built by our team for exactly this kind of high-volume, small-ticket trade.
GraftG launches soon. If chasing £15 payments is the worst part of a job you otherwise love, join the early access list at graftg.co.uk. Your admin sorted. Just WhatsApp it.