Commercial Cleaning Scope of Works, by Site Type

Every task, the area it applies to, and the frequency band it sits in — every visit, weekly, monthly or quarterly. It should also state what is deliberately outside the scope, because the gaps are what cause the arguments. A scope that says 'clean the amenities' is not a scope. One that says which fixtures, at what frequency, restocked to which level, is a document you can hold a contractor to and compare two submissions against.

That is the normal shape of our contracts. A property team might have us on an office tenancy, a warehouse and two strata schemes at once. Each site gets its own written scope, because the buildings are not the same, but you get one supervisor across all of them, one escalation number and one consolidated invoice. The alternative — a different contractor per asset class — is how a facilities team ends up spending its week reconciling four sets of paperwork.

We do not do high-reach external window cleaning, facade or rope-access work, kitchen exhaust and hood degreasing to AS1851, or hazardous-material remediation. Those are licensed trades and we would rather tell you that now than subcontract them quietly and put our name on somebody else's insurance. If a scope needs one of them we will say so during the site walk and you can appoint that trade directly.

By walking it at the hour the work would run and counting the things that actually generate the workload: amenity blocks, headcount, floor surface mix, entry points, waste volume. Floor area on its own tells you very little — a 400 square metre floor with eight people and one with sixty are entirely different jobs. We recommend a frequency, tell you honestly if the one you had in mind is too light, and review it after the first month.

No, and you should be suspicious of a contractor who says they are. Periodic work is scoped, priced and scheduled separately and up front, so it appears in your budget as a known number on a known date instead of arriving as a variation in month four. What is in the monthly figure is everything in the recurring frequency bands of the scope — every visit, weekly, monthly and quarterly tasks included.

Yes, and those scopes are built differently. Clinics get a colour-coded method, hospital-grade disinfectants and a signed cleaning register a practice can hand to an accreditation surveyor without editing it first. Early-learning centres get WWCC-cleared operators, child-safe products and a sanitising log the approved provider can produce at assessment. The compliance obligation is the service on those sites — the cleaning is how you meet it.

A single suite or a small clinic is fine, and plenty of our sites are exactly that. What we will not do is quote a site we have not seen, or take on work at a frequency we do not think will hold the standard, because a scope that fails quietly is worse for both of us than a contract we did not win. If a site is genuinely too small to run properly, we will tell you what would work instead.