Switching cleaning companies: transition checklist
Changing janitorial contractors is mostly an access and paperwork problem, and it goes wrong in the same six places every time. Work through this before you serve notice.
The decision is usually the easy part. By the time a property manager starts looking, the case has already been made by six months of the same conversation. What goes wrong is the changeover itself, and it goes wrong in ways that have nothing to do with how good the new contractor is.
Keys and fobs go missing between the two companies. Nobody documented what the building looked like on the last day, so every mark is now disputed. The vacuum in the janitor closet turns out to belong to the outgoing contractor and leaves with them on a Friday night. The new crew has a scope of work that was copied from a competitor’s quote and does not mention the loading bay.
None of that is hard to prevent, but all of it is hard to fix afterward. The worksheet below is ordered the way the work actually happens: what to sort before you serve notice, then handover, then the first 30 days.
1. Before You Decide to Switch
- Write down the specific failures, with dates, rather than the general feeling that standards slipped
- Check whether the current contractor was ever told in writing and given a chance to correct
- Separate contractor failures from building problems the contractor cannot fix
- Check whether the contracted hours can actually deliver the scope you expect
- Decide whether the real problem is the contractor, the scope, or the budget
2. Contract Exit
- Read the termination clause: notice period, form of notice, and who it must be sent to
- Note any automatic renewal date and how far ahead notice must land
- List equipment, dispensers and consumables owned by the contractor that will leave with them
- Confirm who holds keys, fobs, alarm codes and access cards, and how they are returned
- Confirm the final invoice basis and any periodic work paid for but not yet delivered
- Give notice in writing and keep proof of delivery
3. Document the Scope Before You Tender
- Walk the building and record every area to be cleaned, floor by floor
- Record the frequency required per area, not one frequency for the whole site
- Photograph the current condition of floors, carpets, restrooms and common areas as a baseline
- List the periodic work required in a year with the month it should happen
- List consumables: who supplies, what grade, and who monitors run-outs
- Note access constraints, security requirements and the service window
- Note the areas that generate complaints so bidders price for them honestly
4. Choosing the Replacement
- Send every bidder the same scope document so the prices are comparable
- Walk the site with each bidder rather than accepting a desk price
- Ask each bidder how many cleaning hours their price buys for this building
- Ask how they inspect their own work, how often, and ask to see a real inspection record
- Ask who the named supervisor is and how often they will be on site
- Ask what the customer receives after each inspection and how quickly
- Check insurance and workers compensation coverage is current before signing
- Take references from buildings of the same type and size, not just any reference
5. Transition Week
- Agree the changeover date, and avoid a gap in service across it
- Recover all keys, fobs and codes from the outgoing contractor and change what cannot be recovered
- Confirm the janitor closet is emptied of the outgoing contractor's stock and equipment
- Record the condition of the building on the changeover day, with photographs
- Walk the incoming crew through the building, including restricted and easily missed areas
- Confirm consumables are stocked from day one
- Tell tenants or residents who is cleaning the building now and who to contact
6. The First 90 Days
- Inspect weekly for the first 90 days, no matter what the contract frequency says
- Hold the first review meeting inside the first month, not at the first complaint
- Compare each inspection against the baseline photographs from the changeover day
- Confirm the periodic schedule is booked in with dates, not promised in general terms
- Check the hours actually delivered on site match the hours contracted
- Raise deficiencies in writing with photographs, and confirm they were corrected
- At 90 days, decide formally whether the standard has been set or the same drift is starting
General commitments
- One person owns this transition from notice through to the 90-day review
- Every commitment made during the tender is written into the contract
- The scope document, not the sales conversation, is what the new contractor is measured against
- A baseline record of building condition exists and is dated
- The review date is in the calendar before the transition starts
Review cadence
| Week 1 | Changeover, access handover, baseline record, crew walkthrough |
| Weeks 2-4 | Weekly inspection, first review meeting, deficiencies raised in writing |
| Months 2-3 | Weekly inspection continues, periodic schedule confirmed, hours verified |
| Day 90 | Formal review against the baseline and the contract |
The baseline walk is the one that matters
Take an hour in the final week of the old contract and photograph every area in a fixed order. Entry doors, lobby, elevator interiors and tracks, each corridor, stairwells, restrooms fixture by fixture, the janitor closet, the loading bay, the parkade if you have one. Date the photos. Store them somewhere that is not your phone.
Six weeks later, when a tenant complains about a scuffed corridor wall and your new contractor says it was already there, you will know. Without the photos you will have two confident people disagreeing and no way to settle it, and you will usually end up paying for something twice.
The same walk gives the new contractor a fair starting point. Handing them dated photographs of a building at its actual condition is more useful than any briefing, and it removes the excuse before it gets used.
Rewrite the scope, do not inherit it
The scope of work from the outgoing contract is a description of what somebody agreed to years ago, adjusted informally since by people who have left. Buildings change use. A floor that was open plan is now three tenancies. Carrying that document across is how you end up in an argument about high dusting in month four.
Rebuild it, area by area, with a frequency against every line. Daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly. Include the awkward items people leave out because they are nobody’s favourite: the stairwell behind the fire door, the underside of the entry mat, the glass on the inside of the vestibule, the parkade elevator lobby. If a task has no frequency written next to it, treat it as absent from the contract, because that is how it will be treated in practice.
The commercial cleaning inspection checklist is a reasonable skeleton to build from, and the janitorial vendor audit is what you should be scoring the new contractor against once the dust settles.
Inspect weekly for the first month, then decide
A new crew will miss things in week one that have nothing to do with their competence. They do not know your building. The door that has to be wedged, the tenant who works late on Thursdays, the drain in the loading bay that backs up in heavy rain. All of that gets learned, and it gets learned faster if somebody is scoring the building weekly and telling them.
Four to six weeks is a fair settling period. After that, the scores should be flat and boring. If they are still moving around in week eight, you do not have a new-contractor problem, you have the same problem you had before with different logos on the shirts.
Set the cadence now, while you are still motivated. Every property manager intends to inspect weekly during a transition and most of them stop after the second week, which is exactly when the standard for the next two years gets set.
Common questions
How much notice do you need to change cleaning companies?
Read the termination clause before you do anything else, because 30, 60 and 90 day notice periods are all common and some contracts auto-renew if notice lands late. Work backwards from the date you want the new contractor to start, and give yourself at least three weeks between serving notice and handover for keys, access cards and a walkthrough.
What should you do before the outgoing cleaner leaves?
Walk the building and photograph its condition, area by area, on the last week of the old contract. This is the step almost everyone skips and the one that saves the most argument later. Without it you have no way to tell whether a mark on the corridor wall arrived under the old contractor or the new one, and the new contractor will inherit blame for things they did not cause.
Who owns the equipment and supplies when a contract ends?
Whatever the contract says, and if it says nothing, expect a dispute. Vacuums, floor machines, carts and dispensers are frequently contractor property even when they have sat in your janitor closet for six years. Establish ownership in writing before the last day, and count what is on site while the outgoing supervisor is still willing to walk it with you.
How long does it take a new cleaning contractor to settle in?
Expect four to six weeks before the building looks consistently right, and inspect weekly through the whole of it. A new crew does not know your building yet, and the things they miss in week one are usually the site-specific items nobody wrote down, like the stairwell nobody uses or the door that has to be propped to clean behind.
Should you tell tenants the cleaning company is changing?
Tell them the week before, briefly, with a contact for complaints. Tenants notice a change in faces and will draw their own conclusions if nobody explains it. A short notice also gives you cover for the settling-in period, and it produces early feedback from the people who use the building daily.