It’s 9pm. Three Crew Members Are Still “On the Clock.”
For cleaning business owners tired of payroll padded by forgotten clock-outs. Ghost Clock-Out watches every open shift and automatically closes the ones your crew forgot, using the grace period you set per job, so phantom hours never reach payroll.
What every cleaning business owner already knows.
A cleaner finishes the last job at 4:30, tosses their phone in the cup holder, and drives home. Nobody clocks out. The timer keeps running through dinner, through the evening, sometimes overnight. You catch it at payroll time, if you catch it at all, and now you are negotiating hours with your own employee from memory.
One forgotten clock-out that runs three extra hours costs you roughly $54 at a $18/hr loaded rate. Two crew members doing that weekly is over $5,600 a year in phantom payroll.
Ghost Clock-Out, built cleaning-native.
Every job carries a grace window you configure (the auto clock-out buffer). When a shift stays open past the job’s scheduled end plus that buffer, CleanerHQ closes the entry automatically, records exactly why it was closed, and flags it as a ghost clock-out so it stands out in your timesheet review.
Flagged entries land in your approval queue with the reason attached. You approve the real hours, not the accidental ones, and payroll exports stay clean without a single awkward conversation.
Every feature in one place.
The business impact, in dollars.
Phantom hours are the quietest leak in a cleaning payroll. They never show up as a line item, they just inflate every pay period by a little, and confronting crew about them after the fact damages trust in both directions. Auto-closing shifts removes the argument entirely: the system enforces the rule the same way for everyone, every day.
Frequently asked about Ghost Clock-Out.
What does Ghost Clock-Out do?
It monitors open time entries and automatically closes any shift a crew member forgot to clock out of, after a grace period you configure per job. The closed entry is flagged with a reason so you can review it before payroll.
How is the auto clock-out time decided?
Each job has an auto clock-out buffer you set. When a shift runs past the job’s scheduled end plus that buffer, the system closes the entry. Different jobs can have different buffers.
What if the crew member really was still working?
You or the crew member can file a correction. Corrections are new entries that reference the original, so the audit trail keeps both the auto-closed version and the corrected hours.
Does this work with GPS Clock-In?
Yes. Ghost Clock-Out and GPS Clock-In share the same time entry ledger: GPS verifies where a shift started and ended, and Ghost Clock-Out guarantees it actually ends. Together they make every entry location-verified and time-bounded.
Is Ghost Clock-Out included in the base CleanerHQ plan?
Yes. Ghost Clock-Out is one of 20 modules included on every CleanerHQ seat at $19/mo per admin seat plus $5/mo per crew seat. No feature tiers or add-on pricing.
End phantom hours, automatically.
Book a 20-min Demo
$19 admin · $5 crew /mo · all 20 modules · keep your Stripe · onboard in 1 day