Scope of Work SOW

A scope of work is the written agreement about what is being cleaned, how often, and to what standard. Almost every dispute between a building and its cleaning company traces back to a scope that was too vague to settle the question.

Task plus frequency, not just task

The most common weakness is a scope that lists tasks without attaching a frequency to each one. “Clean restrooms” is not a scope. Restrooms cleaned nightly, with fixtures descaled monthly and partitions detailed quarterly, is a scope.

Frequency is where expectations actually diverge. Both sides agree vents should be cleaned; one assumed monthly and the other assumed annually. Nobody was lying, and the document never resolved it.

What a usable scope specifies

The areas included, and explicitly which are excluded. Each task with its frequency. Who supplies consumables like paper goods and soap, and who restocks them. Access, hours, keys, and alarm procedure. What happens on holidays. How additional or one-off work gets requested and priced. And what the standard is for anything measurable.

Exclusions matter as much as inclusions. A scope that never mentions interior windows leaves it genuinely ambiguous whether they were promised.

Why we walk the space first

You cannot write an honest scope from a phone call, because the things that drive the work are physical: floor types, restroom fixture count, entry-point grit, how the building is actually used, and what the previous cleaning did or did not keep up with.

That is what the free walkthrough is for. It produces a scope specific enough that both sides can tell whether it was met, which protects you more than it protects us.