Xota didn’t start in a boardroom. It started in a Bristol operations office, with a whiteboard full of schedule clashes and a stack of paper invoices nobody could reconcile.
Xota is the product arm of Clean Bees Cleaning Ltd, a commercial cleaning and facilities operation based in Bristol. For years, the team ran the business the way most service businesses do — a scheduling spreadsheet here, a client list there, a finance inbox somewhere else, and WhatsApp threads holding the whole thing together.
It worked, until it didn’t. Contracts were open to the same preventable problems, over and over: a booking missed because the rota lived in two places; a supervisor chasing an operative who’d already clocked off; a client ringing to ask “did you come Wednesday?” and nobody able to answer without a ten-minute hunt through messages.
The cost wasn’t dramatic. It was quiet. A forgotten invoice line. An unbilled extra. A client who stopped renewing because “the communication wasn’t great”. Hours of scheduler time spent rebuilding the week every Monday morning because the previous week had drifted out of sync. It added up to real money, and it was invisible until someone bothered to add it up.
So the team built a tool to make the problem impossible. Not a point solution for scheduling, or invoicing, or HR — one system that held all of it, that everyone worked from, that couldn’t drift out of sync because there was only one copy. That tool became Xota.
Different teams, different spreadsheets, different answers. These are the specific ways money and goodwill leaked out.
No timestamped record of who was on site, when they arrived, what they did. Disputes came down to “we think we did” versus “we didn’t see anyone”.
An invoice would land and a client would ask for a breakdown. Pulling one together meant cross-referencing three systems and hoping they agreed.
A change made on one screen didn’t reach the next. Operatives turned up where they shouldn’t, or not at all where they should have.
Holidays approved verbally, sickness called in to a supervisor, nothing written down until payroll. Overlaps and cover gaps were found the hard way.
Between quarterly reviews, clients had no visibility. When they did ask, it took a scramble to build a report from scratch.
Ad-hoc jobs, additional hours, consumables — done on trust, then forgotten by the time the invoice went out.
Every feature in Xota exists because it closed a specific leak. Here are three that matter most.
Every booking ends with a timestamp, a location, and photos of the job. The client can see it live through the portal. No more “did you actually come?” phone calls — the answer is right there.
Every invoice ships with a per-booking line item, pulled automatically from the schedule. Hours, extras, signed-off photos — all in one document. Clients stop querying invoices when the invoice answers the question before they ask it.
A booking moves on the schedule and HR sees it, payroll sees it, the client sees it, the operative sees it. Not “synced” — the same record, always. Drift is architecturally impossible.
The principles that shape what we build and what we refuse to build.
If a booking exists in two places, sooner or later those two places will disagree. We design features so the data can only live in one place — everything else is a view over it.
Xota is built by the team that uses it to run a real cleaning operation every day. Bad ideas get flushed out in the morning briefing, not in a customer survey six months later.
Clients don’t need to be reassured the work is happening — they need to be able to see it. Every feature that generates evidence (clock-ins, photos, signed-off bookings, invoice detail) earns its place.
The point of a system of record isn’t big ideas. It’s preventing the small, boring losses — unbilled extras, missed renewals, forgotten follow-ups — that otherwise quietly add up to a bad month.
We release weekly. Every release is watched in production. If something doesn’t earn its keep, it goes. Software that pretends to be finished is software you’ll outgrow.
Once the tool had been running Clean Bees for a while, other operators started asking how. Cleaning services, facilities management, property services, field services — different industries, the same quiet leaks. Schedulers losing hours to sync. Invoices queried because there was no record. Clients renewing on the strength of a good supervisor, not a good system.
Xota is now used by service businesses across the UK who would rather prevent the leak than patch it. The product is still built inside an operations team that uses it every day — so the next feature is always the one the team most wished they’d had last week.
Book a 20-minute demo and we’ll walk through Xota with your operation in mind. Or start a 90-day free trial and have a poke around yourself.