Why window cleaning rounds drift, and what a good one looks like

Part 3 of 39 of Building TradeYoke, the story of how the platform was built, from January 2024 to today. Previous: Five years of the same idea, and why we finally started building. Next: What is a round? Designing it in software. See every part on the build timeline.

Quick answer: Window cleaning rounds drift because the information that holds them together (who, where, how much, how often, when last) is kept in several places and updated by hand. A well-run round has one list, a next-due date on every customer, a sensible order, and payment tied to the clean it was for. That was the brief we wrote for TradeYoke in February 2024.

• Rounds drift in four ways: missed cleans, stale prices, a route that no longer fits the map, and unclear payment.
• A good round has one source of truth, a next-due date on every customer, a sensible order and payment tied to the visit.
• You can start fixing drift today, without any software, by writing down the last clean date for every customer.

Nobody sets out to run a messy round. It happens a little at a time. A new customer is written on the back of an envelope. A price goes up for one customer and not for the next one on the street. Someone stops using you and the line stays. The route you drive stops being the order the list is in. After a year, the round you run and the round you have written down are two different things.

• Missed cleans. A locked gate, a wet week, a day off. If the only record of "done" is a tick on a sheet, a skipped house looks the same as a house that has not come round yet.
• Stale prices. Without a regular look at the prices, they stay where they were when the customer joined.
• A route that no longer fits. The order on the list is the order customers joined, not the order you drive.
• Unclear payment. Whether this clean has been paid, and by whom, is in someone's head or in a different book.

Reading across those four, the description writes itself.

• One list. Every customer, with an address, a price and a frequency, in one place that everyone who works the round can see.
• A next-due date on every customer. Not "about every four weeks" but a date, so a missed clean shows up as an overdue one.
• An order that follows the map, reviewed when the round changes.
• Payment tied to the visit. The money for a clean is attached to that clean.

If you only do one thing this week, write down the date of the last clean next to every customer, and sort by oldest. The ones at the top are your drift. It takes an hour, and it tells you more about your round than a year of ticks on a sheet. Our guide to planning a window cleaning round goes through the rest, and pricing a round covers the stale prices.

In February 2024 we turned that description into the design brief for TradeYoke: one list, a next-due date, an order that can be changed, and money tied to the visit. The next articles take those in turn, starting with what a round actually is.

Related: Scheduling and rounds · How to plan a window cleaning round · Pricing a window cleaning round · Running the round · Pricing · The build timeline