The accounting software for a cleaning business is Xero. The harder choice is what sits next to it.

If you run a cleaning business in Australia, use Xero for the books. It handles GST and the BAS, payroll with Single Touch Payroll reporting, super, bank feeds, supplier bills and the reports your accountant will ask for. Most Australian bookkeepers and accountants already work in it, which matters more than any feature, because they are the people who will open your file.

We run a Sydney cleaning business as well as building software, and that is where our own books live. So this post skips the comparison table of accounting packages. The question worth your time is the one that usually hides inside the search: which parts of running a cleaning business belong in the accounting software, and which parts don't.

What Xero should do for a cleaning business

Xero's job is the money once it exists. For a cleaning business that comes down to a short list.

• GST and the BAS. Each transaction carries a tax rate, and Xero builds the activity statement from them. The BAS is only as right as that coding.
• Payroll and super. Pay runs, payslips and Single Touch Payroll reporting to the ATO. Since 1 July 2026 super is paid with each pay run under Payday Super. Check which Xero plan covers the number of people you pay, because payroll limits vary by plan.
• Bank feeds and reconciliation. Every deposit and every payment matched to something real.
• Bills and costs. Chemicals, consumables, equipment, fuel, vehicle costs and contractor invoices.
• Reports. Profit and loss, balance sheet, aged receivables, and profit by site or contract type if you set it up for that.

What belongs in job software

Xero can raise a repeating invoice. For a business with five fixed-price monthly contracts, that may be enough. What Xero knows nothing about is the clean. It can't tell you whether the Tuesday office clean happened, who did it, how long they were on site, or whether a one-off carpet job was added that week. A cleaning business bills for work that happened, so the invoice should come from a record of the work.

That record is what job software holds. Here is how the jobs split.

• Enquiries and quotes: job software.
• Recurring cleans on the schedule, by site and by crew: job software.
• Clock-on times, checklists and photos that prove a clean happened: job software.
• The invoice for each visit, or one per customer each week, fortnight or four weeks: made in job software, kept in Xero.
• Whether the invoice was paid: recorded in Xero, and worth seeing in the job software so the office doesn't have to look it up.
• GST, the BAS, payroll, super and the bank: Xero.

Choosing the job side is its own decision, and our guide to choosing cleaning business software walks through it. For contract work across offices, strata and medical suites, that means commercial cleaning software. For regular house cleans and end-of-lease work, it means home cleaning software. In both, Extrua Dispatch connects to Xero: invoices go across, and paid or voided status comes back. MYOB and QuickBooks connections are coming soon, so today it is Xero only.

The Xero setup a cleaning business needs

A default Xero file works for a cleaning business, but a few settings make it far more useful. Each one is easier on day one than after a year of transactions.

• Show the site on every invoice. One strata manager or facilities company may own a dozen sites, and they will want the site name and their own PO or work-order number on each invoice. Put the site in the reference so a payment can be matched to the right visit.
• Use tracking categories for the work you want to compare. Tag income and direct costs by contract type (commercial, residential, end-of-lease) or by your largest sites. The profit and loss report can then be split by category, and you can see which work pays. It only works if the costs are tagged as well as the income.
• Flag contractors for the Taxable Payments Annual Report. Cleaning is one of the services covered by the ATO's taxable payments reporting. If you pay contractors to clean for you, you may need to lodge a TPAR by 28 August each year listing what you paid each one. Xero can produce the report from contacts you have flagged, so flag each contractor and record their ABN when you set them up. Whether your business has to lodge depends on the ATO's tests, so check the ATO's page or ask your accountant.
• Keep employees and contractors apart in the file. Employees go through payroll. Contractors are paid as supplier bills against an ABN. The label on the agreement doesn't settle which one a person is, because the ATO looks at the whole working arrangement, and a contractor paid mainly for their labour can still be owed super. Paying an employee through bills is how a super shortfall stays hidden.
• Code supplies and recharged consumables properly. Claim GST credits on chemicals, equipment and consumables when you hold a valid tax invoice. If you restock a client's toilet paper, hand soap or bin liners and charge them for it, that charge is income with GST on it. Give it its own invoice line and income account so it doesn't disappear into the cleaning fee.

There is one more, and it causes more drift than all of these. When customers pay by card through Stripe, the money lands as a batch with the fees taken out, and no single deposit matches an invoice. If those deposits get coded to sales, income is counted twice and the invoices stay open. The fix is in why Stripe payouts won't reconcile in Xero.

The setting that matters most in a cleaning business's Xero file is the one that tells you which sites make money. Most files never get it.

Where we'd be wrong about this

A sole trader cleaning a handful of homes may not need job software at all. Xero's repeating invoices, a calendar and half an hour a week can carry a small round. The split starts paying off when there are crews, contract sites with their own invoicing rules, or more visits than one person can remember.

Two systems also means a connection to watch. A link that sends invoices one way and never hears about payments leaves Xero and the job software slowly disagreeing. We wrote about the questions to ask in what “syncs with Xero” actually means. Ask them of any tool you look at, ours included.

If your books are already messy

Plenty of cleaning businesses ask this question after a few years of running on whatever was set up first. The signs are familiar: an aged receivables report full of customers who paid on the day, a clearing account that only grows, a BAS that felt too high, and nobody sure which contractor invoices were entered twice.

Start with how to clean up a messy Xero file, which covers the order to work in. Extrua began because the founder's own cleaning business ended up $56k of variance away from the truth, with card payouts, duplicate invoices and a clearing account behind most of it. If the drift in your file goes back years, Reconcile works through it against the bank, on a copy, before anything in the live file changes.

A check you can do this week: open Xero and pick your largest contract site. Find what it earned last month, what its labour cost, and whether every visit was invoiced. If any of those takes longer than five minutes, you know which part of the setup needs attention first.