Cleaning Specification Template

The specification is not the contract

They are two documents doing two jobs. The contract settles the money, the term, the notice, the insurance and what happens when it ends. The specification settles what is cleaned, how often and to what standard, and it is the one that gets read on a Tuesday when somebody is unhappy about the stairs.

Keep them separate and attach one to the other. A specification written into the body of an agreement can only be changed by varying the agreement, which means a solicitor and a negotiation every time a room changes use. A specification attached as a schedule, with its own version number and its own review date, can be revised by the two people who actually know what the building needs.

This site has a separate cleaning contract clause checklist for the other half, and an office cleaning checklist for the room-by-room task list a cleaner works from. The specification sits between them: fewer words than the checklist, and about the thing the contract is silent on.

Frequency, and why "as required" costs you money

Write every frequency as a number of times in a period. "5 x weekly" is a specification. "Daily" is nearly one, until somebody asks about the bank holiday. "Regularly", "as required" and "as necessary" are not specifications at all: they are an invitation for the client to decide, after the price is agreed, how often the work happens.

The same applies in the other direction. A client who has written "as required" into their own tender document is not being generous; they are asking you to price an unknown. Reply with a number, price the number, and let them tell you if the number is wrong.

Periodic work is where this bites hardest, because it is the work nobody is thinking about when the price is agreed. Carpet extraction, high-level dusting, window glass above reach, kitchen deep cleans and floor sealing all need a frequency, a notice period and a decision about whether they are in the price. The second table on this sheet is for exactly that.

Writing a standard somebody can check

A standard is checkable when two people standing in the room would agree whether it has been met. "No visible soiling, marks or streaking at the end of the visit" is checkable. "Floors will be maintained to a high standard of cleanliness" is not, and the moment it matters it will be read one way by the person who wrote it and another by the person being paid under it.

Say when the standard applies, too. Most cleaning standards are met at the end of the visit and cannot be met all day: a washroom floor cleaned at six in the morning is not the same floor at four in the afternoon, and a specification that does not say which moment it is describing has left the argument open.

Where a national standard exists and the client is using it, name it rather than paraphrasing it. Some tenders reference BS EN 13549 for cleaning quality measurement, and quoting the document is safer than writing your own version of what you think it says.

Who supplies the soap

This is the single most common gap in a cleaning contract, and it is worth real money on an annual contract. Consumables for a busy office, toilet roll and hand towel and soap, can run to hundreds of pounds a month, and a specification that does not say who buys them has a hole in it the size of the difference.

It is not only consumables. Powered machinery, chemicals and their safety data sheets, colour-coded equipment, PPE, a lockable cupboard on site, access to a sink that is not a client washroom, and the removal of the waste your cleaners collect are all things somebody has to provide, and each of them has been assumed by both sides at once.

Waste is the one with paperwork attached. If your cleaners remove waste from the site rather than putting it in the client's own bins, that is a waste transfer with a duty of care behind it, and the specification should say which of you is holding it.

Auditing, and what a failed audit means

A specification with no audit arrangement is a specification that gets checked only when somebody is already angry. Write in who audits, from which side, how often, and whether it is scored.

Then write in the part everybody forgets: what happens when it fails. How the failure is recorded, who is told, how long there is to put it right, and at what point a repeated failure becomes a contractual matter rather than a Tuesday. A client with no route between "unhappy" and "terminate" will use the second one.

Keep the record. An audit nobody can produce is an audit that did not happen, and the audit record is what turns "you never clean the stairs properly" into a conversation about a specific date.

One specification, and the copy the cleaner has

The failure this document is prone to is not being wrong. It is being agreed, filed, and never reaching the person doing the work. A specification in a contract folder and a cleaner working from what the last cleaner told them are two different standards, and only one of them is the one you are being paid against.

Whatever you use to run the work, the test is whether the specification and the instruction the cleaner sees are the same object. If they are two documents, they will diverge, and the first anybody will know about it is an audit.

That is the whole of the argument for software here, and it is narrower than it is usually sold as. It does not write the specification and it will not agree it with the client. What it does is keep one copy of it, put it in the hand of whoever is standing in the building, and produce evidence afterwards that it was worked through.