Workforce Tracking

The question nobody can answer

“Was anyone here on Saturday?”

It is the most ordinary question a facilities manager can ask a cleaning contractor, and in most contracts it is genuinely unanswerable. Somebody was scheduled. Somebody probably came. The evidence is a signature on a sheet in a cupboard, if the sheet still exists.

That gap is where a lot of contract disputes start — not from malice, but because neither side has a record and both are working from impressions.

Scheduled, confirmed, recorded

Schedules carry weekly recurrence per account, so the pattern is defined once rather than rebuilt each week.

Before a shift, the assigned person confirms it. That step exists to surface the gap early: an unconfirmed shift is visible while there is still time to cover it, instead of becoming an absence discovered by a client on Monday.

Clock-in and clock-out happen by voice through CleanPilot or in the app. Voice matters more than it seems — a clock-in that requires removing gloves and typing on a phone gets done late, in a batch, with timestamps that were reconstructed rather than recorded.

Missed clock-outs are not guessed

When someone forgets to clock out, the system flags it for review. It does not close the shift at a plausible-looking time.

That restraint is deliberate. An auto-closed shift creates two false records at once — a payroll entry and a service entry — and both look completely normal. A visible gap that someone resolves is worth more than a clean dataset that quietly contains invented numbers.

What it is, and what it isn’t

This tracks shift events, not people. Confirmed, started, finished, against an account. There is no location trail, and we don’t build one — the contract needs to know whether the building was covered, not where an individual was standing.

The distinction shows up in what the data can be used for. A coverage record answers questions about the service. A location trail answers questions about a person, and once it exists somebody eventually asks them.

Reports that leave the system

Work reports run by account and period and export to PDF or spreadsheet. For portfolios, that’s usually the input to a billing review or a tender — and it’s assembled from records made at the time, not from a summary written afterwards by whoever remembers.