A commercial cleaning scope of work should name every area, the frequency each one is serviced at, the tasks performed at that frequency, the standard it’s held to, and the periodic work listed separately with its own schedule. A scope that can’t be read line by line can’t be inspected, enforced, or fairly compared against a rival quote.
Key takeaways
Most cleaning disputes aren’t really disputes about cleaning. They’re disputes about a document that was never specific enough to settle anything. Here’s what a scope needs to contain so that both sides are looking at the same building.
It does three jobs at once. It tells the crew what to do, it tells you what to inspect, and it lets you price the same work against another contractor. A document that fails any one of those isn’t a scope. It’s a brochure.
The test is simple. Hand it to somebody who has never seen your building and ask if they could walk it and mark each line pass or fail. If they can’t, the scope is too vague to hold anyone to.
Every area gets its own line, and every line gets its own frequency. This is where most contracts go wrong: a single frequency is applied to the whole building, so restrooms and a records room behind a keypad get treated as the same problem. They aren’t.
Writing it out per area also gives you the one lever that lowers cost without lowering the visible result. Dropping a low-traffic zone while restrooms stay nightly takes hours out of the contract where nobody feels them. That’s covered in more depth in our piece on how commercial cleaning gets priced.
A published one, so that “clean” stops being a matter of opinion. The APPA five levels run from Level 1, Orderly Spotlessness, to Level 5, Unkempt Neglect, and Level 2, Ordinary Tidiness, is what most institutions specify, as the University of Lethbridge facilities standard for APPA cleaning levels documents.
Level 2 describes a building that’s clean and well kept, where marks and fingerprints are visible only on close inspection. It’s a realistic target for an occupied commercial building, which Level 1 generally isn’t outside a lab or a clean room.
Naming the level also protects the contractor. Without one, any complaint is automatically valid, because the standard is retroactively defined by the person complaining.
Further apart than most scopes assume. The CDC guidance on when and how to clean and disinfect a facility states that in most situations, cleaning regularly is enough to prevent the spread of germs, and reserves disinfection for areas where people have obviously been ill.
Order matters as much as frequency. The CDC is direct about cleaning before disinfecting, because impurities like dirt make it harder for the chemical to kill germs. Spraying disinfectant onto a soiled surface mostly produces a wet soiled surface.
And if a line in your scope says disinfect, it has to carry a contact time. EPA guidance on registered disinfectants is explicit that the surface should be visibly wet for the entire contact time, and that a surface drying early needs reapplying. EPA-registered disinfectants are available upon request through our cleaning, sanitizing and disinfection service.
On the lines, not on impressions. Take the document, walk the building, and mark each area pass or fail against its stated frequency and standard. Record the date. Three of those in a row will tell you more than a year of complaints.
Inspect the places nobody looks at first, because that’s where hours get quietly removed. Edges and corners, behind doors, the underside of restroom fixtures, high dusting, and the traffic lane on the carpet rather than the middle of the room.
Periodic work needs its own check, since it’s invisible on a nightly walk. Ask when the carpet was last extracted and when the floor was last refinished. If nobody can answer with a date, it probably hasn’t been done. Our contract cleaning includes ongoing quality checks against your cleaning plan.
What facilities managers ask us when they’re rewriting a contract that stopped working.
Long enough to list every area once, and no longer. A 20,000 square foot office usually fits on two or three pages. Length isn’t the quality signal. Specificity is, and a short scope with frequencies against each area beats a long one full of adjectives.
Ordinary Tidiness, the second of five published APPA levels and the one most institutions write into contracts. It describes a building that’s clean and well kept, where dust, smudges and fingerprints are noticeable only on close observation rather than at a glance.
It should name the class and the requirement, not the brand. For disinfection that means EPA-registered products used at label contact time. Naming a brand dates the document and stops the contractor substituting an equivalent when a supplier changes.
The contractor usually drafts it after a walkthrough, because they’re measuring the areas and reading the floor types. You should own it afterwards. If the document only exists in their system and never in yours, you can’t take it to another bidder.
Annually, or any time the building changes. New tenants, a repurposed floor, a change in operating hours, or new flooring all move the hours. A scope that hasn’t been touched in four years is usually describing a building that no longer exists.
Attach the scope to the contract as an exhibit and say in the contract that the scope governs the work. Otherwise you have two documents of equal weight describing different jobs, which is the worst position to be in when something goes wrong.
If your current scope can’t be walked and marked pass or fail, we’ll rewrite it from the building. A thirty-minute walkthrough produces a document with frequencies and a named standard against every area.
