TimeTally - Timesheet Management AppTimeTally

Time Tracking and Timesheet Software for UK Cleaning Companies

A cleaning round is several client sites in one shift, often before the offices open or after they close, with nobody around to check anyone in. TimeTally is mobile time tracking for cleaning services: cleaners clock in when they reach a site, or fill in their hours later from any phone, and every hour is assigned to the site it was worked at. Managers approve remotely with our timesheet approval workflow, and approved hours export straight to Xero, QuickBooks, or CSV. From £3 per employee per month.

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Cleaning timesheet showing hours, breaks and client site for the week
Cleaner clocked in at a client site from their phone

“The app is simple to use, reliable, and makes managing staff records straightforward. The system has saved us a significant amount of administration time.”

CLI ManchesterJordan Ingoe, CLI Manchester
On the round

Simple Weekly Timesheets — Submitted From Any Phone

Cleaners log their hours at the end of each day or week. Enter start time, end time, breaks, and assign hours to a client site. It takes under a minute. No app download required — TimeTally works in any mobile browser, or staff can use the iOS app.

TimeTally timesheet entry screen showing hours and client site assignment

  • The Whole Round, One Screen

    Every working day of the week visible at once

  • Hours Against a Client Site

    Each entry carries the site it was worked at

  • Automatic Break Deduction

    Breaks come off the total before payroll sees it

Approvals

Sign Off a Cleaner's Week in One Screen

A supervisor approving fifteen cleaners should not be matching paper against a round sheet. The week arrives already totalled. Regular hours, overtime and TOIL are separated, and the hours are split across the sites that cleaner covered. Approving it is a read, not a reconstruction.

  • Overtime is worked out against that cleaner's own threshold before you open the week. A late finish at a site that overran is already costed.
  • Each day is one line. Open it and you get what a pay query turns on: the break deducted, the second site, the hours against each contract, and any note the cleaner left about why a clean ran long.
  • Pay is hidden from managers who are not allowed to see it. A supervisor can approve a whole round's hours without seeing what anyone on it is paid.
  • Approving a week does not mark it paid. Approved and exported are tracked separately, so a week signed off on site cannot go through payroll twice.
Timesheet approvals Get Started
Approved weekly cleaning timesheet showing regular hours, overtime, TOIL and pay for each day
Supervisor View

Every Cleaner's Hours for the Week in One List

Open the week and the whole round is on one screen: who has submitted, who has not, and the hours each cleaner logged. You do not open fifteen timesheets to find the one that is missing. Approve the straightforward weeks together, and open the one that needs a look on its own.

  • One Row Per Cleaner

    A tick for submitted, a blank for not, and the total hours beside it. Step back a week with the arrow to check a period you have already run.

  • Approve All, or One at a Time

    Approve All clears a week of routine rounds in a single action. Anything that needs checking gets opened and approved on its own.

  • Export From the Same Screen

    Approved hours go to Xero, QuickBooks or CSV without leaving the list. Nothing is retyped into payroll.

  • The Same Screen on a Phone

    Supervisors on a cleaning round are not at a desk. The manager view is the same on a phone, so a week can be approved between two sites.
Whole round on one screenApprove from a phone
TimeTally manager timesheet view on a phone, listing each cleaner, whether they have submitted, and their hours for the week

Types of Cleaning Businesses Using TimeTally

TimeTally works for any cleaning company that needs to track staff hours, approve timesheets, and export to payroll.

  • Commercial Cleaning

    Offices, retail units, warehouses, and shared workspaces

  • Domestic Cleaning

    Residential cleaning services with multiple client homes per day

  • Specialist Cleaning

    Industrial, end-of-tenancy, deep clean, and post-construction

  • Facilities Management

    Cleaning as part of wider FM contracts. See our FM page

Travel and Multi-Site Working

Logging Travel Time and Multiple Sites

A cleaning round is several jobs inside one shift. The hours only mean something once you know which client site each of them belongs to. TimeTally handles that with projects. Create a project for each site, and a cleaner who works three sites in a day files three timesheet entries. Travel between the sites is logged the same way, so it gets paid instead of forgotten. If you also need proof someone was at a site, geofenced clock-in is an optional add-on. The section below sets out what it does and does not do.

  • A Project Per Client Site

    Create a project for each site you clean. Cleaners pick the site from a dropdown when they submit. Sites can nest, so a contract with three buildings is one project with three under it. Reports show total hours and labour cost per site, which is what you need to check a contract is profitable and to price the next one.

  • Travel as a Separate Entry

    Create a project called Travel and have cleaners log the time between sites against it. There is no dedicated travel feature; this is the same project tracking. It captures the data you need to pay travel time correctly under NMW rules.

  • Notes on Entries

    Cleaners can add a note to any timesheet entry. Use it to record which tasks were done, a problem found at a site, or the route taken between two jobs.
Projects are on by defaultNotes on every entry
TimeTally Projects panel with a project for each client site, sub-sites nested beneath, and the pay each one carries

The Timesheet Screen a Supervisor Works In

Cleaners submit their hours, the week fills in and totals itself, and the supervisor approves and exports. This is that screen running, on a demo team.

All Departments
Jun 2026
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F
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AR1

Amelia Roberts

Kitchen

JK2

James Kelly

Front of house

PS3

Priya Shah

Kitchen

MP4

Maya Patel

Front of house

TW5

Tom Wilson

Bar

Timesheet Requests

3
AR

Amelia Roberts

37h 30m · Week of Jun 15

JK

James Kelly

38h 30m · Week of Jun 8

Time-off Requests

2
PS

Priya Shah

3d · Annual Leave

MP

Maya Patel

2d · Sick Leave

AR

Amelia Roberts

Monday 15 June · 09:00

AR

0h 00m

09:00 – 17:00

Break
End Done

Timesheet submitted

Week of Jun 15

AR

Amelia Roberts

Kitchen

Week of Jun 15, 2026

Mon15
09:00–17:00·30m

7h 30m

Tue16
09:00–17:00·30m

7h 30m

Wed17
09:00–17:00·30m

7h 30m

Thu18
09:00–17:00·30m

7h 30m

Fri19
09:00–17:00·30m

7h 30m

Submit Timesheet Submitted

Payroll Export

Week of Jun 15, 2026 · 5 employees

Employee
Reg. pay
Overtime
Total
AR

Amelia Roberts

37.5h

£281.25

—

£281.25

JK

James Kelly

40h

£300.00

£22.50

2h

£322.50

PS

Priya Shah

32h

£240.00

—

£240.00

MP

Maya Patel

38h

£285.00

—

£285.00

TW

Tom Wilson

40h

£300.00

£45.00

4h

£345.00

Total · 5 employees

£1,406.25

£67.50

£1,473.75

Confirm Export Exported!

What TimeTally Does for Cleaning Teams

TimeTally is a straightforward time tracking, timesheet and holiday management tool. Here is what it does and how cleaning companies use it.

Weekly Timesheet Entry

Cleaners log start time, end time and breaks for each day, from their own phone or a shared device, at a time that suits them. Total hours and overtime are calculated for them. If you would rather hours were recorded as they happen, clock-in mode does that instead. You set which method applies across the company, or leave the choice to each cleaner.

Client Site Tracking (Projects)

Create a project for each client site. Cleaners assign their hours to a site when they submit, and split one shift across two or three sites where the round demands it. A separate Locations dimension records the building as well as the contract. Reports show total hours and labour cost per client. Use them to check a contract is profitable and to price the next one you quote for.

Hourly Rates and Overtime

Set an hourly rate and an overtime rate for each cleaner. TimeTally calculates standard pay and overtime pay when a timesheet is submitted. Overtime thresholds can be daily or weekly, so they match the contracts you run.

Payroll Export

Export approved timesheets to Xero, QuickBooks, or CSV with one click. The export includes employee names, standard hours, overtime hours, pay amounts, and break deductions. No manual re-entry needed.

Mobile Access — No App Download Needed

Mobile time tracking for cleaning services has to work on the phone the cleaner already owns. TimeTally runs in any mobile browser. Nobody has to install an app on a personal device; they bookmark the page instead. There is a native iOS app for cleaners who prefer one.

Approval Workflow

Cleaners submit a timesheet at the end of the period. Their manager gets a notification and can approve or reject it from a phone. A rejected timesheet goes back to the cleaner with a note saying what to correct. Only approved timesheets appear in payroll exports.

Proving a Cleaner Was Actually at the Client's Site

Every control below is off until an admin turns it on, and most cleaning firms never turn any of them on. When a contract does ask for one — a client who wants evidence the 06:00 clean happened, a site being audited — commercial cleaning attendance tracking is a setting in TimeTally, not a separate product you have to buy.

Cleaners can only clock in once they are on the client's site.

Draw a radius around each site you clean, anywhere from 25 metres to 5 kilometres. A cleaner outside that radius cannot start a shift at the site. You set the radius per site, so the city-centre office where the boundary is the front door can be tight, and the retail park where the van parks two streets away can be wide.

Each site is set to strict or lenient. Strict blocks the clock-in. Lenient allows it and records how far outside the radius it happened. Lenient is the right setting for a basement plant room where a phone cannot see a satellite.

Three limits are worth knowing before you plan a contract around it. It is a paid add-on, free during the 14-day trial. It only applies when clocking in is the only way to log hours; run it alongside the fill-it-in-later form and a cleaner can type the hours the geofence refused. And it proves a phone was at the site, not a person, so a colleague already on site can still clock someone in.

How the GPS check works in full

Lock start and end times to real clock-ins.

This setting is off by default. With it off, cleaners type their own start and end times.

Turn it on for the contracts where hours get queried by the client. Start and end times then come only from a real clock-in. A cleaner who arrives at 06:12 cannot write 06:00 on Friday when the sheet is due, and a missed clock-out has to be sorted out that day rather than reconstructed a week later.

Supervisors can still edit an entry when something genuinely went wrong. The record stays correct, not just locked.

More on tamper-proof timesheets

Weekly, fortnightly or four-weekly timesheets.

Choose a period of one, two or four weeks and set the date the first one starts. Every timesheet after that follows the same cycle.

Contract cleaning rarely runs to one clock. Cleaners are often paid weekly while client contracts are reviewed monthly. Set the period to match the run it feeds, and nobody has to add four weekly sheets together by hand to answer a client query.

Every hour tagged with the contract it belongs to.

Tag time with a project, a location, an activity, or all three. Projects are already on. Add locations and activities when a contract needs the work broken down further than the site it happened at.

Whatever you use follows the hours everywhere: timesheet lines, shifts, exports and reports. That is the difference between knowing a cleaner worked thirty hours and knowing that two schools took nineteen of them.

Team Overview

See Who Is Working and Who Is Off

The team calendar puts the whole team on one screen: submitted timesheets, booked time off and absences. For a cleaning company the question it answers is coverage. Before you move a cleaner between sites or agree a date, you can see in one look who is already out that week and which rounds are short.

Team calendar showing cleaner availability and booked holidays
Why it matters

Why Cleaning Companies Need Accurate Timesheets

The UK cleaning sector employs around 700,000 workers, many of them part-time, on variable hours, and spread across multiple client sites. Getting their timesheets right is not just about payroll accuracy — it is a legal obligation.

The National Minimum Wage Act 1998 requires all working time to be paid at or above the legal minimum — £12.21 an hour for workers aged 21 and over from April 2025. For cleaning companies that includes travel between client sites during a shift. HMRC has publicly named employers who got this wrong, and penalties reach 200% of the underpayment. If your cleaners travel between jobs and nobody records that time, you may be underpaying them without knowing it.

The Working Time Regulations 1998 cap average weekly hours at 48 over a 17-week reference period and require 11 consecutive hours of rest between shifts. Cleaners who work several sites, sometimes for more than one employer, can pass those limits without anyone noticing. Evening and early-morning contract cleaning is where firms get caught out. A cleaner who finishes an office at 21:00 and opens a gym at 05:30 has had eight and a half hours off, not eleven. Accurate timesheet records are the only way to see it.

Holiday entitlement catches cleaning companies out just as often. Under the Employment Rights Act 1996 every worker gets 5.6 weeks of paid annual leave, including staff on zero-hours contracts and irregular hours. Since April 2024, holiday for irregular hours workers accrues at 12.07% of the hours worked each pay period. Working that out by hand across a team of part-timers is slow and easy to get wrong.

TimeTally does not solve all of this on its own. It is a time tracking and timesheet tool, not a cleaning management platform. What cleaning time tracking gives you is an accurate digital record of hours worked, assigned to specific client sites, with automatic holiday calculations and payroll export. That record is the foundation for staying on the right side of employment law.

UK Compliance
UK Employment Law

How TimeTally Helps with UK Compliance

TimeTally is a timesheet tool, not a compliance system. It does not actively monitor working time limits or send alerts for breaches. But accurate timesheet records are the foundation of meeting your regulatory obligations — and that is what TimeTally provides.

National Minimum Wage

Accurate hours tracking ensures your effective hourly rate does not fall below the National Minimum Wage (£12.21/hour for workers aged 21+ from April 2025). For cleaning companies, this is especially relevant for travel time between sites, which counts as paid working time. TimeTally captures this data — the compliance decision is yours.

Working Time Regulations

TimeTally records all hours worked, including overtime. This gives you the data to check the 48-hour weekly average (over a 17-week reference period) and 11-hour rest between shifts under the Working Time Regulations 1998. You can export this data at any time if HMRC or the HSE request records.

Holiday Entitlement

All UK workers get 5.6 weeks statutory holiday (28 days for full-time). TimeTally calculates entitlement automatically, including pro-rata for part-time staff, mid-year starters, and the 12.07% accrual method for irregular hours workers introduced in April 2024. Sickness is recorded against the same record as a separate leave type, so a round's absence pattern and its statutory sick pay position can both be worked out in one place. The detail is on our leave tracking software page.

HMRC Record-Keeping

HMRC requires employers to keep records of hours worked for at least two years. TimeTally stores all timesheet data digitally with timestamps and approval records — a complete audit trail you can export whenever needed.

Break Tracking

Under UK law, workers on shifts over 6 hours are entitled to a 20-minute uninterrupted break. Use our break time compliance calculator to check requirements. TimeTally records breaks separately and deducts them from total hours, so payroll figures are accurate and you have a record that breaks were taken.

Client Audit Trail

Project tracking gives you a digital record of who worked at which client site, for how long, and when. This is useful if a client queries their invoice or disputes the hours billed.

Simple, Transparent Pricing

One price. Every feature. No surprises.

£3/employee/month

Billed monthly, incl. VAT. Cancel anytime.

Track hours by client site using project-based timesheets
Mobile timesheet submission from any phone, no app required
Automatic overtime calculations at individual pay rates
Holiday entitlement calculated automatically, including irregular hours
Export to Xero, QuickBooks, or CSV for payroll
Get Started
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In short

How do commercial cleaning companies track employee time at client sites?

Most use a mobile time tracking app that ties every hour to the client site it was worked at. A cleaning round covers several sites in one shift and nobody passes an office, so a paper sheet ends up filled in from memory days later. TimeTally is a time tracking app for cleaning companies in the UK at £3 per employee a month. Cleaners clock in when they arrive, or enter start time, end time and breaks later from any phone browser or the iOS app. Either way they pick the client site the hours belong to. Managers approve from their phone. Overtime is calculated against the thresholds you set. Holiday accrues automatically for part-time and irregular hours staff. Approved hours export to Xero, QuickBooks or CSV. Where a contract needs attendance evidence, geofenced clock-in stops a shift being started away from the site.

Price
£3 per employee a month
Logging
Any phone browser, or the iOS app
Tracks to
A project per client site or contract
Exports to
Xero, QuickBooks, CSV
Optional
Geofenced clock-in, strict clocking

Frequently Asked Questions

Can cleaners submit timesheets from their phone without downloading an app?

Yes. TimeTally works in any mobile browser — no app download or installation needed. Cleaners can bookmark the page on their phone. There is also a native iOS app on the App Store for those who prefer it.

How do cleaners log hours at different client sites?

You create a project in TimeTally for each client site. When cleaners submit their timesheet, they select the relevant site from a dropdown. If they work at three sites in a day, they create three separate entries. Reports show total hours and costs per site.

Can cleaners log travel time between sites?

Yes, but not through a dedicated travel feature. You create a project called 'Travel' (or similar), and cleaners log travel time as a separate timesheet entry assigned to that project. This captures the data you need to ensure travel time is paid correctly under NMW rules.

Does TimeTally have GPS tracking or geofencing?

Geofenced clock-in is available as an optional paid add-on, and it is included free during the 14-day trial. You draw a radius around each client site and set it to block a clock-in from outside that radius, or to allow it and flag how far out it was. Three limits are worth knowing. It only applies when clocking in is the only permitted way to log hours — if cleaners can also fill in a form, they can type the hours the geofence refused. It checks location at clock-in and clock-out, not continuously, so it is not live tracking of where your cleaners are during a shift. And it proves a phone was at the site rather than a particular person, so it does not on its own prevent one cleaner clocking in another.

How does TimeTally handle holiday entitlement for part-time or irregular hours cleaners?

TimeTally calculates statutory holiday entitlement automatically. For part-time staff, it pro-rates the 5.6-week entitlement. For irregular hours workers, it can apply the 12.07% accrual method. UK bank holidays are pre-loaded. Remaining entitlement is shown in real time.

Can I set different pay rates for different cleaners?

Yes. Each employee has their own hourly rate and overtime rate. When timesheets are submitted, TimeTally calculates standard pay and overtime pay based on these individual rates. You can update rates at any time.

How does the approval workflow work?

Cleaners submit their weekly timesheet. Their manager receives a notification and can review the entries, then approve or reject from their phone. Rejected timesheets go back to the cleaner with a note. Only approved timesheets are included in payroll exports.

What payroll systems does TimeTally export to?

TimeTally exports to Xero, QuickBooks, and CSV/Excel. The export includes employee names, standard hours, overtime hours, pay amounts, and break deductions. Most payroll systems can import CSV files if a direct integration is not available.

Does TimeTally help with Working Time Directive compliance?

TimeTally records all hours worked, which gives you the data to check the 48-hour weekly average and rest periods between shifts. However, it does not actively monitor for WTD breaches or send alerts — it provides the records, and compliance decisions remain with you.

Is there a reward system for cleaners who submit timesheets on time?

No. TimeTally had a points-based rewards feature and it was removed. What replaced it for chasing late submissions is simpler: a manager can see who has not submitted yet and send that cleaner a reminder in one tap, which lands as a notification on their phone. Setting your timesheet period and cut-off expectations with the team, and approving weekly rather than monthly, does more than points ever did.

Still have a question? See all FAQs

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