Cleaning dispatch

A turnover the moment a stay ends.

Cleaning dispatch fires the moment a reservation flips to a checkout day. The cleaner receives a job with property, lockbox code, and any guest notes — and you get a single confirmation when it’s done.

Turnovers are where short-term rental ops slow down: a checkout at 11 a.m., a check-in at 4 p.m., and a five-hour window where the property has to be ready. Watchfox watches every checkout day on every listing, queues the right turnover job into the cleaner's board, and confirms back when the job is signed off.

What dispatch reads

The dispatch pipeline is the simplest of the four lanes. It reads three inputs every time the calendar updates:

  • Checkout events.A reservation that's checked out, or that's within four hours of a scheduled checkout on the calendar.
  • Property details.The listing's address, lockbox code, wifi password, and any notes you keep — each optional and editable per listing.
  • Cleaner board.Which cleaners are on the roster, which listings they cover, and which shifts they've accepted.

How a turnover job is built

When a reservation flips to a checkout day (or the calendar syncs a future checkout date), the agent builds a job in five steps:

  1. Compose the job. Address, lockbox code, wifi, checkout time, and a checklist template (linens, towels, restock, photo proof).
  2. Route to a cleaner.The agent assigns it to the highest-priority cleaner on the listing's roster who hasn't hit their shift cap. If you rotate by region, it honors that rotation.
  3. Hand off the job.The job posts to the cleaner's board (SMS or the in-app board, whichever they opted into) with a 90-minute accept window.
  4. Confirm on completion. When the cleaner taps Done, an audit entry lands in your log: which listing, which checkout, who was on the job, and any photo proof they uploaded.
  5. Open the next check-in. The listing's status flips back to ready, and the next reservation's check-in instructions become current.

Where the audit trail lives

Every dispatch event is logged: which listing, which checkout, the time the job was queued, who it was assigned to, when it was accepted, and when it was confirmed done. If a turnover is missed — cleaner didn't accept, or accepted and didn't confirm — Watchfox reroutes the job to the next cleaner in the roster and pings you in the inbox.

What you do (and don't do)

You don't schedule cleanings — the calendar drives that. You set up the roster: a cleaner per region, the shift cap they can run, and per-listing lockbox codes + wifi. Once the roster is in, dispatch reads the calendar and runs end-to-end.

What this looks like in week one

Most hosts onboard with a single cleaner covering all listings, then expand the roster as volume picks up. Week one is usually the eye-opener: the inbox stops filling with checkout pings because every check-in now carries a confirmation stamp you can see.

Related articles

Cleaning dispatch chains with the 30-day calendar: every checkout day is also a cleaning slot on the calendar, so the dispatch pipeline, the rate table, and the calendar share the same window.