The Cleaning Contract Was Profitable Until Someone Said 'While You're Here'
Every cleaning contract starts the same way. You quote 3 hours a night, 5 nights a week, and the numbers work.
Then week 6 arrives. The office manager catches your cleaner by the lift and asks whether she could give the kitchen cupboards a wipe inside, since she's here anyway. Week 9, the glass partition in the boardroom goes on the list. Week 14, somebody mentions the bins in the car park.
Nobody signed anything. Nobody asked for a new price. Your 3 hours is now 3 hours 40, your cleaner is late finishing, and the margin you quoted on has gone to pay for cupboard wiping.
The fix happens before the first shift, in the document almost nobody writes properly: the scope of work.
The prompt
We published one today that does this job start to finish: Write a Cleaning Scope of Work That Stops Scope Creep.
You feed it the site, the areas and sizes, the attendance pattern, who pays for consumables, access and security rules, anything the client said during the walkthrough, and the list of jobs you refuse to take on. It gives you back a document with a task-by-area-by-frequency table, consumables, access, staffing, quality checks, exclusions, and a clause covering how extra work gets priced and approved.
What it looks like with real inputs
Say you fill it in like this: a 2-floor office in Leicester, 14 desks per floor, 2 washrooms, a kitchen, reception and a stairwell. 5 nights a week, 6pm to 9pm. You supply soap and paper, the client pays for it monthly. Key safe plus an alarm code, lone working after 7pm. The office manager mentioned "the glass always looks smeary." You don't do external windows, carpet shampooing, or desks with paper on them.
The useful part of the output is the frequency table, because it turns opinions into rows:
| Task | Area | Frequency |
|---|---|---|
| Empty bins, replace liners | All areas | Daily |
| Vacuum traffic routes | Offices, reception, stairs | Daily |
| Sanitise and restock | Washrooms | Daily |
| Internal glass, partitions and door glass | Reception, boardroom | Weekly |
| Vacuum under desks and edges | Offices | Weekly |
| Descale taps, wipe cupboard fronts | Kitchen, washrooms | Monthly |
| High-level dusting, vents, skirting | All areas | Quarterly |
Two lines in that table are doing the heavy lifting. "Cupboard fronts" answers the cupboard question before it gets asked at the lift, and the smeary glass gets a named weekly slot so the complaint never turns into an unpaid daily task.
The exclusions section then says what nobody enjoys saying out loud, in language a facilities manager will sign: external windows above ground level, carpet shampooing, dishwashing, and desks with paperwork on them, each with a one-line reason. Last comes the extras clause: anything outside the table gets a written price and an email approval before a cleaner touches it.
Where the money is
A 3-hour nightly contract at 5 nights a week is roughly 780 hours a year. Let 20 minutes a night leak away on unpriced extras and you've handed over about 86 hours. At £14 an hour of loaded labour cost, that's £1,200 off one small contract, and you'll never see it on an invoice because it never became one.
The second win is harder to put a number on. When the glass has a weekly row and a cleaner missed it, the conversation is about a known task that slipped. When the glass has no row at all, the conversation is about whether your company is any good.
How to run it
- Walk the site with your phone. Photograph every area, count rooms and washrooms, note the door that sticks and where the stock cupboard is.
- Paste your notes into the prompt, including every sentence the client said during the walkthrough. Those sentences are the scope creep in seed form, so write them down verbatim.
- Read the exclusions list and the extras clause before you send it. Those two sections are the ones you'll be quoting back to somebody in 4 months, so they have to say what you mean.
Then send it as an appendix to the contract and ask for a signature on the same page. One side of paper, signed once, and "while you're here" becomes a quote instead of a favour.
The prompt is free to use here: Write a Cleaning Scope of Work That Stops Scope Creep. It sits alongside today's other new additions for cleaning companies, including a site cleaning card a new cleaner can follow on their first shift, a risk assessment and method statement for the paperwork clients ask for before you start, and a cleaner job ad with a trial shift scorecard.