The cleaning supervisor daily report

Not long ago I was on a call with the owner of a cleaning company, a good operator with a solid book of buildings. His supervisors were doing exactly what he asked. Every day, each of them wrote up what they did and sent it to him as an email. Then he told me what happens when he actually needs the information. He has to go back through hundreds of emails to find anything about one building.

I thought about that for a while afterwards. He has supervisors out there hammering notes into an email every day, and the notes are saved, but they are not even searchable unless he does a text search. I mean, what the hell is that? How did that ever become the acceptable way to run a cleaning company? Plenty of companies still run exactly that way, and it costs them every time a customer asks a question.

Why the end-of-day email fails

The email is organized wrong. It is sorted by supervisor and by day: here is Maria’s Tuesday, five buildings, a paragraph each. Every question you will ever ask about that information is about one building. The property manager at the medical building calls about the washrooms. Renewal is coming up at the office tower. A tenant says the carpet in suite 400 has looked bad for a month. To answer any of those, you need every note about that site, in order, and the email gives you every note about every site from one person on one day.

It also goes nowhere. The supervisor writes that the second floor washroom had a stained partition. Who is fixing it? By when? Did anybody check? The email has no answer, because an email is a message, and a message is finished the moment it is sent. The stained partition is still there next Tuesday, and the supervisor writes it up again.

And the customer never sees any of it. All that work your supervisors are doing, the visits, the checks, the problems caught before a tenant noticed, sits in your inbox. The customer thinks about you when something goes wrong, and you have nothing in front of them to say otherwise.

What the daily report should hold

One report per site per visit. That single change fixes most of it, because now the report is filed under the building, which is how you will look for it. Inside each one I want six things.

The visit. When the supervisor arrived, when they left, and who was on shift. If somebody called in sick and another cleaner covered, write it down. Cover shifts are where quality slips, and you want to know which nights they happened.

The inspection. Which areas were checked and how they scored. Every failed item is written as the area plus what was wrong, with a photo. “Washroom not great” is useless. “Second floor men’s washroom, urinal base stained, photo attached” is something a cleaner can fix.

The fixes. Every failed item gets a name and a date. And the supervisor confirms whether last visit’s items were fixed, or carries them forward. This is the part the email never does, and it is the part that matters most.

The customer. Did the supervisor speak to the property manager? What did they ask for? Write their words down as close as you can, and anything you promised them, with a date.

Supplies and the building. Low stock, broken equipment, and anything wrong with the building itself, like a leak or a burnt-out light. Customers notice when you flag their problems before they find them.

Tomorrow. The one thing that has to happen at that site next visit, and anything the office needs to know today.

The worksheet below puts all six on one page. Print a stack and keep it in the supervisor’s truck if you are still on paper. Paper filed by site in a binder beats an email sorted by date.

Fill it in at the site, not at the kitchen table

A report written from memory at nine at night is a summary of what the supervisor remembers. It has no photos, the failed items are vague, and the cover shift is forgotten. Fill it in while walking the building. The supervisor spends a few minutes per site and goes home with nothing left to write.

Keep it short enough that they will actually do it. Supervisors are busy, and a report with forty questions gets the same answer to all forty. If you want a fuller inspection on some visits, use a proper scored form like the cleaning inspection form and let the daily report point to it.

What a year of these gives you

When the reports are kept by site, they add up to something. At renewal you can show the customer how many times you were in their building, what you found and how fast it got fixed. I wrote about using exactly that record in how to raise prices on a cleaning contract. Monthly, you can roll the same reports into a customer summary, and the cleaning inspection report template shows one way to lay that out. Over time you can see which sites keep failing on the same lines, which is the start of a real quality control system.

That is why we built KleanProof the way we did. The supervisor inspects on a phone at the site, every failed item gets a photo, and the fix goes straight to the cleaner by text or email. All of it is filed under the building. If I want to know what happened at one site since June, I open the site and never touch an inbox. If you are hiring the person who will be writing these reports, I also wrote about hiring your first cleaning supervisor.