Soft FM,
under control.

The soft FM problem is evidence, not effort

Facilities management cleaning contracts are rarely lost because the cleaning was bad. They are lost because nobody could demonstrate it was good.

A facilities manager reviewing a contract wants to see audit scores over time, incident records, current RAMS for each site, training records for the staff who attend, and completion rates against the specification. If assembling that takes a week of digging through spreadsheets and email, you will assemble it once, badly, the night before the review.

Keeping the evidence attached to the work as it happens is the entire game. Every job completed against a specification, every incident logged with a severity, every audit dated, so the review meeting is a report you print rather than a project you undertake.

Per-site is not the same as multi-site

Plenty of software will let you record several addresses. Soft FM needs more than that: each site has its own cleaning specification, its own frequency, its own access and security arrangements, its own risk profile and often its own client contact.

A clinical site needs two-stage cleaning and colour-coded equipment. A warehouse needs machine access and a working-at-height assessment. An office needs washroom consumable management. Treating them as the same contract with different postcodes is how specifications get missed and audits get failed.

CleanFlo holds the specification, the risk assessment, the compliance score and the job history at site level, so the cleaner attending a location sees what that location actually requires.

Healthcare, education and care: the services, and the honest limit

A soft FM contractor’s portfolio usually has a surgery, a school or a care home in it, and those sites are priced and specified differently from an office. CleanFlo ships them as services rather than as a sector module: the starter catalogue offers a Healthcare & Medical shelf you tick from and edit before anything is added. Every figure here is the app’s own starting suggestion rather than a researched market rate or anything CleanFlo charges.

Education is not a shelf of its own. Schools, colleges and campuses run on the Commercial & Office shelf, priced by size of site and frequency, with the term-time pattern booked as dated visits rather than as a repeat, because the repeat is weekly, fortnightly or monthly and a school year is neither.

The limit is worth stating plainly, because it is the reason this is a section rather than a page. CleanFlo has a general health and safety module: risk assessments on a 5×5 matrix, method statements, incidents by severity, scheduled audits and a live 0 to 100 compliance score built from what is on file. It does not implement the national cleanliness standard for healthcare premises, Star Hygiene ratings, CQC evidence frameworks or any other sector scoring scheme, and it does not produce a score any of those bodies would recognise. If your contract is judged against one of those, you will be running that scoring somewhere else, and it is better to know that now than in week three.

Cleaners attending these sites are the other half of what a client asks about. DBS checks, right-to-work records and the training register are described in full on the commercial cleaning page.

Where multi-site contracts lose money

• The site nobody looks at. In a portfolio of fifteen locations, one is usually under-priced and over-resourced. Contract-level analytics find it; a single P&L does not.
• Absence cover. Covering a sick cleaner across sites costs travel and often overtime. If it is not in the price, it comes straight out of margin, and on multi-site contracts it happens weekly, not occasionally.
• Scope creep. "While you are here, could you also…" accumulates silently over a three-year contract. A written per-site specification is what lets you price a variation rather than absorb it.
• Consumables. Washroom supplies scale with the client's headcount, not your contract value. Price them separately or you will be funding their growth.