Scheduling and completing audits

Be clear about what this is before you use it, because it is simpler than most people expect. An audit here is a title, a type, a site, a due date, some notes, and a status. There is no checklist to tick off inside it, no per-item scoring, and no pass or fail. Completing one is a single button.

That sounds thin until you have run a cleaning business for a year. The thing that actually goes wrong is not that the PPE check was scored 82 rather than 91. It is that nobody did the PPE check in March, or April, and nobody noticed until a client asked. What CleanFlo tracks is the commitment and whether it was kept, and it makes the not-kept case impossible to miss.

The Audits tab

Go to Health & Safety and pick Audits. The button in the top right changes to Schedule Audit. The list is ordered by due date, soonest first, and a red count on the tab is the number currently overdue.

The search box reads Search audits… and matches the title and the location, not the notes. The list pages at ten and Export CSV produces audits.csv with the columns Title, Type, Location, Due Date and Status. Search first and the export follows the search, so you can hand a client a CSV of only the checks that mention their site.

Search for something that is not there and CleanFlo quotes your term back at you rather than showing a blank table: "No audits match your search", then the term, then a suggestion to try an audit title or a site, with a Clear search button under it. It is a small thing, but an empty table with no explanation is how people conclude their data has gone.

Scheduling one

Schedule Audit opens a drawer headed Schedule Audit, subtitled "Plan a new compliance check". Two fields are required: a title and a due date. The form refuses with "Title is required." or "Due date is required." if either is missing.

The six audit types

The type is a label. It does not change the form, the fields or the scoring in any way, and it exists so the list can be scanned and the CSV can be grouped. These are the six, verbatim.

Completing one

Open an audit and the drawer is headed with its title, with the type underneath as the subtitle. Inside: the status badge, the location, the due date written as Due: and the date, the notes block, and one full-width primary button reading Mark as Completed.

Press it and three things happen at once. The status becomes Completed, a completion timestamp is stored, and CleanFlo confirms with the toast "Audit marked as completed". Reopen the record afterwards and there is an extra green line in the meta reading Completed followed by the date. The Mark as Completed button is gone, because there is nothing left to do.

The middle status, In Progress, is set from Edit Details rather than from a button. Use it for a multi-day check, or for one you have started and had to leave. It behaves exactly like Scheduled as far as the score is concerned: an In Progress audit past its due date is still overdue.

Underneath both of those, in its own danger area, is Delete Audit. CleanFlo asks first, quotes the audit title back in the question and says the deletion cannot be undone, then confirms with "Audit deleted". Deleting is for something you scheduled by mistake. An audit you decided not to do is a different thing, and the honest way to record that is to complete it with a note saying what you found instead, or to leave it overdue and take the points.

Overdue, and what it costs

Overdue is the one status you never set. It is worked out every time the screen draws, from two conditions: the audit is not completed, and its due date is strictly before today. It is never written to the record, which is why it does not appear in the Audit status select and why a completed audit can never be overdue no matter how late it was finished.

An audit is on time for the whole of its due date. One due today is Scheduled all day and turns Overdue tomorrow morning, which is the behaviour anyone with a diary expects and is worth knowing before you go looking for a bug.

Overdue audits are one of the four categories that take points off your compliance score, capped at 25 in total. What each one costs depends on how late it is, and it is a step rather than a slope so that it can be explained in a sentence.

So one chemical store check that slipped twelve days ago is five points off, and the score breakdown names it: the audit title on the left, "12 days overdue" as the reason, and the points on the right. Completing it removes the deduction immediately, and so does moving the due date, which is worth being honest with yourself about.

Where audits show up elsewhere

The Audits tab is not the only place these records are read from. Three other parts of CleanFlo count them, and it is worth knowing which number means what before somebody quotes one of them at you.

Building a rhythm you can keep

The failure mode with audits is not doing them badly. It is scheduling eleven of them in a burst of enthusiasm in January, missing all eleven by March, and watching a quarter of your compliance score disappear into a category you have stopped reading. Fewer audits, kept, beat more audits, missed.

A rhythm that survives contact with a small cleaning business tends to look like this. One PPE audit a month, rotating round your sites rather than covering all of them at once. One chemical safety check a quarter, in your own store where the stock actually lives. One equipment check a quarter, timed to whenever your PAT testing falls. A site inspection per client per contract review, booked the day the review is booked. And one general compliance check a year, in the month your insurance renews.

That is roughly twenty records a year, all of them keepable, and it gives a facilities manager asking about your inspection regime a real answer with dates against it. Export the tab to CSV and you can hand them the whole history.