Cleaning Compliance Documents: What to Ask For Before You Sign

Cleaning compliance documents are the only part of a cleaning proposal that can be checked. Everything else in the folder — the photographs, the promises about reliability, the language about partnership — is a description of intent. The certificates, the registers and the specification are the parts that either hold up or do not, and they are the parts almost nobody reads.

So this page is the reading. It is written to be used against Clean Best as readily as against anyone else, because a checklist you can only use in our favour is marketing, and you would be right to ignore it.

The two insurance certificates are not interchangeable

Public liability covers damage the contractor does to your property or to a third party. Workers compensation covers the cleaner who is hurt in your building. Buyers routinely ask for “proof of insurance”, are handed one certificate, and never notice the other is missing — which is the one that becomes expensive at three in the morning when somebody has fallen down a fire stair. Ask for both, as certificates of currency rather than policy numbers, and check that the insured entity named on each is the same legal entity that will sign your agreement.

A police check register, not a claim about police checks

“All our staff are police checked” appears on essentially every cleaning website in the country, and it is unfalsifiable as written. What is falsifiable is a register: the names of the people who will actually attend your site, and the date each check was completed. Ask for the register for your crew, not the sentence from the brochure. Clean Best completes a national police check before a cleaner’s first shift and records it, which is a different thing from asserting it.

Working with Children Checks: numbers, and expiry dates

In New South Wales the Working with Children Check is administered by the Office of the Children’s Guardian, and a check has a number that can be verified. Whether your particular setting requires one is a question for your own organisation and for the Guardian — this page will not tell you what your obligations are. What we can tell you is our own rule: anyone rostered to a school, an early learning centre or a paediatric clinic holds a current check, and we hand you the numbers and the expiry dates so you can verify them rather than trust them. If you are appointing a cleaner to an early learning service, the Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority is the national authority for the National Quality Framework and the right reference point.

A SWMS that describes your building

A Safe Work Method Statement sets out the high-risk parts of a job, what could go wrong, and the controls in place. Clean Best writes one for any site where the work involves plant, working at height, confined spaces or a live industrial environment, and plenty of building owners and principal contractors require one as a condition of access regardless of what the job is. The test of a real SWMS is embarrassingly simple: read it and see whether it mentions your loading dock, your mezzanine, your forklift traffic. If it could be about any warehouse in Sydney, it is about none of them. What your own site actually requires is a question for SafeWork NSW, the work health and safety regulator in this state, and the model codes of practice sit with Safe Work Australia.

The chemical register is the one nobody asks for

It is also the one that matters most in a clinic, a kitchen or an early learning centre. The register lists every product in use on your site with its current safety data sheet attached. If somebody is exposed to a product, the safety data sheet is what the treating clinician wants, and the moment after the incident is the wrong moment to start looking for it. The second-order use is quieter and just as important: the register is how you tell whether the products being used in a treatment room are appropriate for a treatment room. For cleaning and infection prevention in healthcare settings, NSW Health publishes the guidance worth reading before you write the scope.

The specification is the document you will actually use

Every other document in the pack is read once. The specification is read every time something goes wrong, because it is the only thing that establishes what “properly cleaned” was supposed to mean at your address. Without one, a complaint is one person’s opinion against another’s, and the argument is unwinnable in both directions. With one, it is a two-minute conversation. Insist that it is written from an inspection of your premises and that it separates per-visit tasks from weekly and periodic ones, so that nobody can quietly reclassify a nightly job as a quarterly one.

And then: who checks, and how often

A compliance pack issued at mobilisation and never looked at again is theatre. The question that predicts month nine is who audits the site once the novelty has worn off, how often, and whether you hear about it when nothing is wrong. Clean Best audits every site monthly against its written specification and sends the findings either way, because a report that only ever arrives after a failure tells you nothing about whether anyone looked. Anything below standard is rectified before the next visit at our cost.

If you want ours, call 1300 494 983 or email hello@cleanbestgroup.com.au and we will send a sample pack. If you are comparing contractors, ask each of them for the same eight documents on the same day. The pack that arrives first, and the pack that mentions your building, will not usually be the one attached to the cheapest proposal — but it will be the one attached to the contractor still holding the standard next winter.