Six questions on quoting, time tracking, payroll, and prospecting. See where your workflows have clear room for improvement, and which bottleneck is worth fixing first.
After a building walkthrough, how long before a priced quote reaches the prospect?
What the six questions measure
The scorecard walks the three places a commercial cleaning company usually loses time. Quoting gets two questions: how long a walkthrough takes to become a priced quote, and whether anyone besides the owner can price a job. The back office gets two more, on how crew hours arrive each week and how long payroll close runs once they do. The last pair covers the front end, where accounts come from and what happens when an RFP lands on a Friday afternoon.
Every answer scores 0, 1, or 2, so a completed scorecard lands between 0 and 12. Where the twos cluster is what decides the first build. A company scoring 8 with both twos sitting in payroll needs something different from one scoring 8 with both twos in quoting, even though the totals match.
How to read the score
Three or under reads as an operation that is mostly holding together. Nothing in the answers flags a systemic problem, so the useful question becomes which single automation is worth doing first. Four through seven is the most common result for an established company: two or three specific bottlenecks, each of them buildable, with the sequencing being the only real decision.
Eight and up means several workflows are dragging at once, and usually the owner already knows which ones. The scorecard earns its minute there by putting a number on a running complaint and by separating the area that costs the most from the one that gets complained about most.
What each bottleneck usually turns into
Twos in the quoting questions usually mean the pricing logic lives in one person's head and the walkthrough notes get re-keyed before anything goes out. The build that follows is a quoting system running on your own rates, which the instant quoting use case shows end to end. The janitorial bidding software guide covers what the packaged tools already handle, which is worth reading before anyone builds anything.
If the twos land on how hours arrive and how long payroll close runs, the path is time to payroll, and the time tracking and payroll guide is where to start. Sourcing and RFP answers point somewhere else again, at a prospecting build, mapped in the commercial cleaning lead generation guide.
After the scorecard
Six questions take about a minute and give you a starting read. A real answer comes from watching the work, which is what the three-week discovery engagement does. It ends with a prioritized menu of builds you choose from, and Colby hosts and maintains whatever gets built. If you already know which workflow is costing you accounts, you can skip the scorecard and start a quote instead. To run a deeper pass on your own first, the write-up on auditing a services business for automation gives you the longer method.