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Cleaning compliance software: the paperwork is the product, not the overhead

Health and safety documentation in a cleaning business is not an internal nicety. It is produced because a client asked for it, and it is often the thing that wins or keeps the contract. An operator who cannot produce a site risk assessment on the day it is asked for does not lose points; they lose the tender.

Which is why "zero paperwork" is the wrong promise, and it is the promise this page used to make. The paperwork is the deliverable. What software can honestly do is make it cheap to keep, hold it against the site it belongs to, date it, and let one person produce all of it as one document at the moment somebody asks.

The 5×5, and what it refuses to guess

A risk assessment is built hazard by hazard on a five by five matrix: likelihood against severity, scored one to five on each. One to four is Low, five to nine Medium, ten to sixteen High, seventeen to twenty-five Critical. Each hazard carries the controls you put in place and a second score for the residual risk after them, which is the pair a facilities manager reads.

A hazard nobody has scored is shown as unscored. Not Low, which would be a claim nobody made, and not Critical either: the arithmetic this replaced banded unscored hazards as Critical by accident, and printed real assessments that way.

The finished assessment prints to a clean A4 page, which is the format the document is actually asked for in. Site-specific is the point: chemical hazards in a plant room, working at height on a shopfront, lone working after five and slip risk on a wet floor are different assessments, and they belong to the site rather than to the company.

Incidents, the accident book and RIDDOR

An incident is logged by type and by severity, from low through to critical, with the time, the detail, the site and photographs, and it stays open or under review until somebody closes it with what was done about it. A cleaner can report one from their own phone, and the nine incident types are translated into the same twenty-seven languages as the rest of the cleaner app, because choosing the right category is the one place a language gap does real damage.

Accident book entries carry a RIDDOR reading beside them: whether the entry looks reportable, under which heading, and by when. The deadlines are the regulations’ own, checked against HSE guidance: notify without delay and report within ten days for a death, a specified injury, a non-worker hospital case or a dangerous occurrence; fifteen days for an over-seven-day absence; an over-three-day absence recorded rather than reported.

Two things it deliberately will not do. It does not report: nothing is submitted to the HSE and nothing here pretends otherwise, so the duty stays where the law puts it, on the employer. And "not reportable" is never given as a verdict. Where it says an entry does not appear reportable it says what was recorded and what to check, because the circumstances are not all in a database and it is not the software’s call.

Audits, the vault and a score you can explain

Audits are scheduled per site by type: site inspection, chemical safety, equipment check, PPE audit, risk assessment review and general compliance. One whose date has passed is flagged as overdue rather than quietly rolled forward, which is the difference between a schedule and a wish.

The compliance vault holds the documents themselves, each with an expiry where it has one, sorted so the expired and the expiring are at the top and the things that need nothing doing are at the bottom.

Over all of it sits a live score out of a hundred on the dashboard, and its whole design is that it can be explained to the business it describes. Four categories, capped so that no single one can zero the score and there is always a route back: unresolved incidents, overdue audits, unmitigated risk and assessments past review. Every point deducted names the record it came from and the reason. Recent events weigh more than old ones, and an old open record fades but never disappears, because an open record is still open.

The pack that goes with the tender

When a client asks, the answer is one document. The tender pack prints your own health and safety position in your own words, the risk assessments with their risk levels, the audits, the compliance documents and the active staff, dated the day it is produced.

Every section renders even when there is nothing in it. A pack that silently drops its risk-assessment section because there are none on file looks, to the person assessing you, exactly like concealment; a section that says there are none on file is still an honest, complete document. The one exception is the safety policy statement itself, which says you have not written one rather than inventing a policy nobody holds.

What it leaves out is hazard-by-hazard detail and the incident log. A tender pack is the summary a client judges a contractor by, not the operational record behind it, and an incident log in particular is an internal record rather than something to hand a prospect. Everything behind every row is still in the app for the client who asks for it directly.

The people evidence sits beside it, and the next section is what it holds.

The people half: DBS, right to work and the training register

Compliance is not only the site. A client asking for your paperwork asks two questions, and the second one is who is coming into the building.

Each cleaner’s record holds documents by kind: contract, right to work, DBS check, certification, training, hazardous waste handling and insurance. A reference number and an expiry date are a complete record on their own, so recording that an enhanced DBS exists and when it runs out uploads nothing at all, and the scan is an attachment rather than the record. What the expiry buys is the warning, on the same thirty-day clock the vault above uses, because one definition of expiring soon runs through the whole product rather than two.

Right to work is handled differently on purpose. A passport scan is not evidence that anybody checked it, and it is the checking that protects an employer, so a right-to-work document with no dated check is a state of its own and is reported as one. It is the single alert here that never clears itself by the passage of time.

The training register turns the shelf round, because the question a client actually asks is not what one named cleaner holds. It groups the qualifications the company holds by title, most urgent first, lists the holders under each, marks what has expired or is expiring, and names the people who do not hold it. Somebody who has left drops out of it: their certificate is not evidence that the company is qualified.

Two limits are worth knowing before you lean on it. Titles are free text and are matched only for case and spacing, so COSHH and COSHH Awareness are two rows rather than one, which is the price of not deciding for you what a cleaning company may train its staff in. And the register counts training and certification only, deliberately not DBS checks or right-to-work documents, so a register you hand a client is never a list of who has been DBS checked. Employment type, and the two things CleanFlo does not do with a subcontracted workforce, are on the commercial cleaning page.

What this does not do

It does not report anything to the HSE, or to any other authority. It advises on RIDDOR and records what you did; submitting is yours.

There is no COSHH substance library and no safety data sheet store beyond the document vault. Chemical safety is an audit type and a hazard on an assessment, and a data sheet is a file you keep with the others; nothing here holds a catalogue of products, dilution rates or exposure limits. Our free dilution calculator and COSHH assessment template are the honest answer to that half today.

It is not a consultancy and does not write your assessments for you. The matrix, the controls and the review dates are yours to fill in, and a template that arrives pre-filled with somebody else’s hazards is worth nothing in front of an inspector.

And it does not make a claim about conformance on your behalf. A score of ninety-four is a reading of your own records, not a certificate, and nothing here is an accreditation.