From Guesswork to Precision: A Smarter Way to Budget Cleaning Costs

Facility managers juggle tight budgets while ensuring buildings meet high cleaning standards — a job that’s more daunting than meets the eye. The problem is that traditional budgeting methods tend to rely on broad estimates rather than precise calculations, which can lead to inefficiencies, hidden costs and inconsistent results. Without in-depth cost analysis, it's easy to overspend in some areas, while under-budgeting in others.

A cleaning costs calculator changes all that by providing a data-driven breakdown of expenses. Instead of guessing, facility managers can pinpoint exactly where resources are going — and where adjustments can be made to get the exact right level of clean.

Cleaning Costs Add Up—But Are They Adding Up Correctly?

For most businesses, cleaning is the largest maintenance and operations budget item, with labor accounting for up to 80% of total costs. Calculating cleaning costs requires more than tallying up wages and supply expenses. The challenge is to understand how labor hours, task frequency and operational changes combine to impact the bottom line.

This means answering tough questions, including:

• How many custodial staff are truly needed to maintain quality cleaning?
• How much time does each cleaning task require, room by room, facility-wide?
• How do shifts in processes — like frequency changes or mechanization — affect costs?
• To what portion of the budget does each cleaning task contribute?
• Can automation or new cleaning methods reduce costs without sacrificing quality?

Workloading — a process that analyzes tasks, frequencies, and production rates — helps answer those complex questions. Viewing costs through a workloading lens shows how even minor efficiency improvements can drive significant savings. For example, cutting supply costs by 10% might reduce the overall budget by just 1%, while a 10% improvement in labor efficiency can yield up to 7% in total savings.

It's important to note that managing labor effectively is not about cutting jobs — it’s about smarter task distribution, leveraging technology and maintaining high standards with the right resources. Imagine, for example, a facility expanding by 50,000 square feet but expecting the same workforce to maintain cleanliness. In that scenario, staff become overworked, and cleaning standards slip.

A best-in-class cleaning calculator helps facility teams avert those pitfalls by enabling facility managers to:

• Allocate labor efficiently across different areas.
• Identify mechanization opportunities to streamline tasks without sacrificing quality.
• Benchmark against industry standards to set realistic staffing expectations.

Five Steps to Maximize Cleaning Budgets

Cleaning Calculators at Work

A cleaning calculator can work at any type of facility. However, there are some types of facilities that benefit greatly from their use. These include:

Schools & Universities

Smarter Scheduling, Cleaner Campuses

Facility managers align cleaning schedules with student activity patterns, ensuring high-traffic areas stay clean while avoiding over-staffing.

Healthcare Facilities

Ensuring Compliance and Safety

Hospitals must adhere to strict sanitation protocols. A cleaning calculator optimizes disinfection procedures and reduces cross-contamination risks by assigning resources to critical areas.

Commercial Building Service Contractors (BSCs)

Help Protect Profit Margins

Since BSCs sell labor, precise cost tracking is crucial — a cleaning calculator ensures competitive yet profitable contract bids and accurate labor cost forecasting.

Extra Cleaning Credit: Doing More Without Overworking Staff

Combined with calculator insights, strategic equipment upgrades and proactive training also make cleaning more efficient. Mopping, for starters, goes much faster with auto-scrubbers: Traditional methods take 30 minutes per hallway; an auto scrubber cuts it to 15 minutes.

Proper training takes savings a step further, helping employees learn new methods, avoid defaulting to old manual methods out of habit, and save cleaning time. Consider, for instance, the incremental improvements in restroom cleaning that come with mechanization and training:

What’s more, training and mechanization reduce worker fatigue and enhance job satisfaction — fueling higher job retention, employee growth and organizational success in the form of a more professional cleaning workforce that delivers consistent results.

For example, one facility with 200 restroom fixtures originally spent $48,750 annually on restroom cleaning. By implementing mechanization, costs dropped to $40,000 — an $8,750 annual savings. With additional training, costs fell further to total $30,000 in yearly savings. Over multiple years, savings like these can add up to support other organizational goals, like reinvesting in staffing, equipment or facility improvements.

A Smarter Way to Clean

Regardless of the type of facility you manage, smarter planning can lead to smarter cleaning. By integrating a staffing cost calculator into your staffing strategy, you can shape a more cost-effective approach to custodial operations now, and into the future. Ready to calculate your optimal cleaning budget? Contact BradyPLUS today.