The situation
Meridian clean and maintain 38 commercial buildings across the West Midlands with sixty staff, most working split shifts early morning and evening. Margins on this work are thin enough that a few unbilled hours a week across the portfolio is the difference between a profitable contract and a loss-making one.
Cleaners clocked in by sending a text message to a supervisor. Nobody was being dishonest; people simply sent the message when they remembered, which might be on arrival, might be ten minutes in, and on a bad morning might be on the way home.
What was actually going wrong
Client invoices were built from contracted hours. Payroll was built from claimed hours. Nobody was reconciling the two, because there was no shared record to reconcile them against — and over eighteen months the two figures had quietly drifted apart.
The managing director's own estimate before starting was that the gap was 'a few hours a week'. It was not possible to check, which was itself the problem.
Separately, a missed site was impossible to prove or disprove. When a client complained that a building had not been cleaned, Meridian's only options were to apologise or to argue, and both cost something.
“We thought the gap was a few hours a week. We could not check, and not being able to check was the actual problem.”
What they changed
Geofenced check-in went in at all 38 sites. Out-of-area attempts are flagged for a supervisor rather than refused outright, because several sites are in basements and underground car parks where a location fix is unreliable.
Timesheets are now built from that check-in data, approved by exception. Shifts that ran as planned approve themselves; supervisors look only at the short ones, the late ones and the overtime.
Crucially, both payroll export and client invoicing now come from the same approved record. They cannot disagree, because there is only one set of numbers.
Where they landed
The gap between invoiced and paid hours closed, because it became visible. On this margin, that is the number that matters.
Client complaints about missed sites are now answered with a timestamp rather than an apology. Meridian report that the complaints themselves dropped, which they attribute less to the evidence than to staff knowing attendance is recorded.
Supervisors stopped spending their mornings on roll calls. The exceptions come to them instead of them going looking.
Managing Director
Meridian Facilities
“We were losing money in the gap between what we billed and what we paid. We couldn't see the gap until it was measured.”