Housekeeping scheduling software schedules rooms at one site against a daily deadline. That is a different problem from a cleaning contractor's, which is customers at many addresses on a fortnightly round: there is no drive time to protect and no series to preserve, and the scarce resource is the few hours between the last checkout and the first arrival. The figure that makes the roster defensible is minutes per room by room type, measured from recorded starts and stops rather than assumed, and that is what to judge a product on.
What a housekeeping board has to show, and in what order
Rooms in status order with the deadline on the same screen: which are still occupied, which are due out, which are stripped, which are waiting on inspection, which are released. Then who is on shift and what each of them still holds. Then the one action the board exists for, which is moving a room from one housekeeper to another without retyping the day. A board that keeps the names in one place and the rooms in another will be maintained on paper by lunchtime, and the paper version is the one nobody can cost.
Minutes per room, the figure the roster is built on
A roster is an assertion that the work fits the hours, and it is only as good as the minutes per room behind it. Measure them by type, because a checkout, a stayover and a deep clean are three different jobs, and measure them from recorded starts and stops rather than from what the standard says they should take. The record also has to hold the hours nobody schedules: the Department of Labor's Fact Sheet #22 states that an employee engaged to wait is working, so a housekeeper held on the floor while a guest finishes packing is on the clock, and that rest periods of 20 minutes or less are counted as hours worked. Software that records a shift but not the room gives you neither the minutes nor the waiting.
Overtime is scheduled, never discovered
The Department of Labor's Fact Sheet #23 states that covered employees must receive overtime pay for hours worked in excess of 40 in a workweek at not less than time and one half their regular rates of pay, that the workweek is a fixed and regularly recurring period of 168 hours which need not match the calendar week, and that averaging hours over two or more weeks is not permitted. The last of those is the one a roster breaks: a heavy week balanced against a light one is two separate workweeks, and the heavy one is owed its premium whatever the fortnight adds up to. A product that plans a two week cycle should be able to show you the totals one week at a time, on the workweek you actually operate.
What free housekeeping management software gives you, and where it stops
The board, and while you are working the floor yourself that is genuinely enough. What a free plan will not hold is the hours attached to the room, so the minutes per room figure above stays a guess and the roster stays an argument. The second limit arrives sooner here than in a cleaning business: free tiers are usually capped on users or on units, and a site has its whole unit count on the first day rather than growing into it, so the cap is met in week one instead of year two.
Questions people ask about housekeeping scheduling software
Does a hotel need different software from a cleaning contractor?
Usually, and the test is what the product thinks the unit of work is. A contractor schedules a customer at an address that repeats; a housekeeping department schedules a room at one site that turns over daily. Products built for the first make you create a customer per room, which works and is miserable.
How many rooms should one housekeeper be given?
Your own measured figure rather than a number from a benchmark. Record starts and stops by room type for a fortnight, take the median so that one disastrous room does not set the standard, and build the roster from that. Then keep measuring, because the figure moves with the season and with who is on shift.
Can a spreadsheet run the board?
It can run the plan. It cannot run the record, because the moment someone else is cleaning the room you need to know when they started and finished rather than when you meant them to.
Is a housekeeping checklist template worth using?
As a starting list, yes; as the standard, no. The list is what the minutes per room are measured against, so it has to match your own room types and what your inspection actually checks. Take a template for the room-by-room order and then cut and add until it describes the rooms you clean, because a line nobody can observe is a line nobody will do.