Regular cleaning customers are predictable. Turnovers are not. A property manager emails on Tuesday that a unit is empty Friday and shown Monday; a short-term rental host needs the place reset between an 11 AM checkout and a 4 PM check-in. A good turnover cleaning schedule treats each of these as its own job with a hard start and a hard finish, and fits it around the homes you already clean every week.
What makes turnovers different
Three things set a turnover apart from a regular clean:
- The window is fixed by someone else. You can’t start before the tenant hands back the keys or the guest leaves, and you can’t finish after the next one arrives.
- The scope is bigger and less certain. Inside the oven, inside cabinets, walls and baseboards, sometimes trash left behind. Nobody knows how bad it is until the door opens.
- Someone who wasn’t there pays. The landlord or the host is judging your work from a distance, which means proof matters more than on any other job.
Take the request the same way every time
Turnovers come in by email, by phone and through property managers’ own messages. Whatever the channel, write down the same facts before anyone schedules it: the address and unit, when it’s empty, when it has to be ready, how to get in, and what “done” means for this owner. A request that arrives without a ready-by time is the one that gets you a call at 3:45 asking why the bathroom isn’t finished.
In Sentra Scheduler a turnover is a one-time visit. It can come in from the request button on your website, from an email in the shared inbox, or be typed in by the office on the phone-entry screen. The job type decides which questions get asked, so “When is the unit empty?” and “When does it need to be ready?” are on every turnover request, not just the ones where somebody remembered.
Protect the window
Once the visit exists, put it on the schedule inside its window and leave room around it. A few habits help:
- Don’t stack a turnover right after a regular home across town. Sentra Scheduler leaves time for the drive from the last stop and warns when there isn’t enough.
- Give turnovers to a crew that can absorb surprises: two people rather than one, and a lighter afternoon behind them.
- Promise the owner an arrival window, not a minute. The visit carries the window you told them, and the schedule flags a move that would start outside it.
Get in without a phone call
A crew standing at a locked door is the most expensive minute of the day. Lockbox codes, gate codes, which door to use and where to leave the keys belong on the property, not in someone’s text history. Each site in Sentra Scheduler has its own access notes, and the crew sees them on the visit in the crew app before they get out of the van. Change the code once on the site and every future visit there has the new one.
Prove the unit is ready
For turnovers, the after photo is the product. Set the job type so a visit can’t be closed without after photos and a short checklist: kitchen, bathrooms, floors, appliances inside, trash out. If you want a record of what the place looked like on arrival, add a before photo too, so damage left by a tenant isn’t blamed on your crew.
When someone is on site to accept the work, the crew can collect a signature on the phone, and a signed ticket with the work done goes to the site contact by email. When nobody is there, the photos and checklist answers stay on the job for the office to send.
Turnovers and regular homes on one board
The mistake many cleaning companies make is running turnovers on a separate list. Then the Friday turnover and the Friday regulars both look fine on their own and collide on the day. Keep them on one schedule: weekly and every-other-week homes come due as recurring visits, turnovers drop in as they’re booked, and the office sees one day per crew with the drive between stops. See how regular homes are set up in our guide to a house cleaning schedule.
A simple checklist
- Every turnover request records empty-from and ready-by times.
- Access instructions live on the property’s access notes.
- Turnovers go to a crew with slack behind them.
- After photos and a short checklist are required to close.
- Regular homes and turnovers share one schedule.
That turnover cleaning schedule works on paper, in a spreadsheet or in software. Sentra Scheduler just makes the steps hard to skip. See how it fits a cleaning business on the cleaning crews page.