Commercial Cleaning | Hiring Commercial Cleaners

Commercial Cleaner Audits: What They Are + Why Most Cleaners Avoid Them (+ Examples)

February 20th, 2025 | 11 min. read

I was on-site for an audit when the receptionist pulled me aside.

“That’s been sitting there for three or four days,” she said, pointing to the floor near the toilets.

I looked down. It was a tampon wrapper.

Now, a lot of cleaning companies would do one of two things. Either they’d shrug and say, “Well, that’s not our fault— your staff shouldn’t be leaving rubbish on the floor,” or they’d quietly pick it up, bin it, maybe mumble an apology, and move on. Either way, they wouldn’t think twice about it.

But that’s not how we operate at In-Tec Commercial Cleaning. Instead, I took a photo, logged it for our cleaning team, and then put it in the bin—because obviously, that’s part of the job. But the real issue wasn’t why the tampon wrapper was on the floor. It was why it had been sitting there for days without being cleaned up.

The receptionist could have picked it up herself. She even said so.

“I know I could have just thrown it away,” she told me, “but I wanted you to see it.”

She was absolutely right. She shouldn’t have to pick it up. She shouldn’t have to chase the cleaning company to make sure the job is getting done.

That’s exactly why I logged it in the audit. Because if something is getting missed, I don’t just want it fixed today—I want to make sure it doesn’t happen again. By documenting it, I was flagging it to the cleaning team so they could see the problem for themselves and take responsibility for correcting it.

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Audits aren’t just about walking around with a clipboard and ticking boxes, to give the appearance of maintaining a commitment to high standards of clean. Regular, recurring audits are about checking the work, documenting what needs to improve, and making sure the right people take action. It’s about holding ourselves accountable so the client never has to chase us down.

We’ve talked about this before—if your cleaning partner isn’t holding themselves accountable with a transparent, documented auditing process, then you’re the one left picking up the pieces. And that’s when the real frustration starts. You start noticing small things slipping. The bins don’t always get emptied. The floors don’t always look quite right. And before you know it, you’re chasing your cleaning company for answers—when they should have been checking their own work from the start.

That’s why we need to talk about audits—what they are, why they matter, why most commercial cleaners avoid having an auditing process, and what you should expect from your cleaning partner. Because if no one’s checking, you can’t be sure the job is actually getting done.

Why Most Commercial Cleaners Don't Perform Audits

A cleaner who is truly committed to delivering excellence will always have a documented process to audit the quality of service being provided to their clients. It means setting a standard and holding everyone accountable to it.

When they’re done properly, audits aren’t just about fixing individual issues—they create consistency. When audits happen regularly, you don’t get those annoying gaps where something goes unnoticed for weeks until someone finally complains. Everything just runs the way it should.

Of course, every world-class cleaner has their own way of performing audits. So, later in this article, I’ll walk you through how we handle audits at In-Tec. But first, we need to address something far more important: most commercial cleaning companies don’t have an auditing process at all.

And there are two reasons for that.

The Post-Contract "Set-It-and-Forget-It" Trap

Most cleaning companies talk a good game in the beginning. They tell you everything you want to hear—they’ll be thorough, they’ll be proactive, they’ll make sure everything is done to a high standard. And for the first few weeks, they probably are, like the "honeymoon phase" in a new relationship.

But once the contract is signed, the cleaners are in place, and a little time passes ... they disappear. No one from the company checks in. No one verifies that the work is truly being done. And unless the client complains, they just assume everything is fine. By the time clients realise their cleaning company isn’t keeping up, the issues have already piled up.

That’s what we call the “set it and forget it” trap.

I see it all the time. I’m quoting a client right now who is constantly emailing and calling their cleaning company, chasing them down over missed tasks. Why? Because no one from the cleaning company ever comes to check on the work. They’ve been assigned a cleaner, and as far as the company is concerned, that’s the end of the story. The only time they’ll show up is if the client is on the verge of cancelling.

In this industry, I hear the same excuse over and over again from cleaners who don't have auditing processes. “We don’t have time to check every site.” But that’s rubbish. It’s not about time. It’s about whether they care enough to follow through.

Then there are those cleaners who say they're checking in ... but they aren't auditing anything.

Yes, There Are Cleaners Who Fake Audits

Let’s say you’re working with a commercial cleaner who tells you they perform regular audits on site. Since they're the "cleaning experts" to you trust them to manage that process, without asking questions.

Now, in some cases, that cleaner will show up on-site periodically. Maybe someone walks through the lobby, has a quick chat with the receptionist, and asks, “How’s everything going?” And if she says, “Yeah, it’s all good,” they tick a box and call that an audit. They never walk the site or inspect the work. But on paper, they’ve done their “audit,” and that’s all that matters to them.

In other cases, you'll encounter cleaners who do perform audits, but they manipulate the results to make themselves look good and hide issues.

Here’s how it works. Instead of rating everything fairly, they weight the easiest tasks more heavily so the final score looks better. Let’s say an office area has five key tasks—emptying the bins, vacuuming the floors, dusting high surfaces, cleaning desks, and wiping down touchpoints. A proper audit would rate each of those tasks equally because they all contribute to a clean space.

But a lot of cleaning companies will give more weight to emptying the bins and vacuuming the floors—because those are the things most cleaners do. So even if the dusting and desk cleaning are neglected, the audit still shows a pass rate of 80% or higher.

It looks great on paper. But in reality, the site isn’t being cleaned properly. The worst part? The client never knows. As long as they’re receiving their reports with decent scores, they assume everything is fine—until something major gets missed.

What a Proper Auditing Process Should Look Like

Whether you’re evaluating the commercial cleaner you already have or considering a new one, you can now see how important the auditing process is. It creates accountability for everyone involved and ensures your site stays consistently clean.

Of course, not all audits are created equal. And that’s where things get tricky. If you don’t know what an honest, thorough audit should look like, how do you even know what questions to ask? Whilst we can’t speak to how other cleaners operate, we can show you exactly how audits work at In-Tec.

We regularly audit all of our client sites. Now, some of our clients are audited weekly. Others, where we've built a strong cleaning team, are audited fortnightly. If a new cleaner starts at a site, we actually audit it every day for two weeks to make sure they're meeting our standards.

Whatever the cadence, here an overview of our auditing process.

Step 1: The Walkthrough (Inspecting the Site)

Every part of the site gets checked. If we clean it, we audit it. That includes:

Meeting rooms and boardrooms
Open-plan office spaces
Kitchens, break rooms, and lunch areas
Amenities, toilets, and so on
Locker rooms, showers, and end-of-trip facilities
Stairwells, lifts, and common areas
Fire stairs and back-of-house areas

We also inspect the cleaners’ room (yes, the room for our cleaners)—because you can’t expect someone to clean properly if their own workspace is a mess. If the cleaners’ room is disorganised, we sort it out.

Step 2: Documenting What's Right + What Needs to Improve

As we walk through, we document everything. Every audit includes:

Photos of anything that needs attention
Notes on areas that could be improved
Checks on stock levels, so supplies don’t run out
A rating system that provides a clear picture of how well the site is being maintained

We don’t do “Yep, it’s fine” or “No, it’s not.” Our audits use graded ratings, so we can track trends over time.

As a part of this process, we use SafetyCulture, an app that calculates audit scores automatically based on the data we enter, with no ability to manipulate the scoring. There’s no fudging the numbers or massaging results to make things look better than they are.

If an audit score comes out as 98.43%, that’s what it is—98.43%.

Step 3: Immediate Action + Follow-Up

An audit means nothing if it’s not acted on. That’s why, as soon as the audit is completed, it goes through a process to make sure any issues get fixed.

Here’s how it works:

The audit is logged in our system, and if there’s anything that needs fixing, it gets flagged to the cleaning team immediately.
The cleaners review the audit, acknowledge any issues, and confirm when they’ve corrected them.
Once that’s done, I personally sign off on the audit to make sure it’s been handled properly.
If the client wants to see the audit, we can send it to them automatically through our system.

That last point is important—most clients trust us to handle it. They don’t need to see every individual audit because they already see the result: a consistently clean site. But if they ever want to review an audit, it’s there for them.

Why Audits Matter to Us: The Changing Receptionist

For months, everything seemed fine at a particular client site. They were happy, the site was clean, and there were no complaints. Every time I dropped in and asked the receptionist how things were going, she’d tell me, “Yeah, all good.”

Then she left.

A new receptionist took over, and suddenly, the cleaning was a problem.

“This isn’t being done properly.”
“We’ve noticed dust building up in certain areas.”
“This isn’t up to the standard we expect.”

Nothing about the cleaning had changed. The only thing that changed was who was evaluating it.

Once again, this is why audits are so important to us. If the only measure of cleaning quality is whether someone feels like the site is clean, then everything is based on perception. And perception is unreliable. One person might think the place looks great, while another notices every little thing that’s been missed.

Now It's Your Turn: Ask the Right Questions

You just want to know the job’s being done. That’s what this all comes down to. But that only happens if you can trust your cleaning company to actually follow through—to check their own work, fix what’s not right, and hold themselves accountable without waiting for you to notice a problem first.

Because if they’re not checking, then who is? You? Your staff? The receptionist who happens to notice something’s been sitting on the floor for days? That’s not how it should work. If you’re paying for a service, you shouldn’t have to go looking for problems. Your cleaning company should already know what’s happening on-site, long before you do.

And yet, most don’t. So whether you’re evaluating the cleaner you already have or considering a new one, ask the right questions:

Do you have an auditing process? If they can’t explain it in detail, they don’t have one.
How often do you audit your sites? If the answer is “when there’s a complaint,” that’s not an audit. That’s damage control.
What does an audit include? If it’s just a walkthrough and a thumbs-up from reception, it’s useless.
Who fixes issues that come up in an audit? Because if no one’s responsible, nothing changes.
Can we see audit reports? If they hesitate, ask yourself why.

If your cleaning company can’t explain exactly how they audit their work, there’s only one reason for that: they don’t. So, the real question is—are you okay with that?

A good cleaning company doesn’t wait for you to point out what’s wrong. They don’t assume everything’s fine just because no one’s complained. They check, they document, and they fix things before you ever have to think about them.

If you're interested in learning more on how to choose the correct commercial cleaning partner for your organisation, you can download our guide, 10 Questions to Ask Before Hiring a Commercial Cleaning Company. Or you can contact us at any time with your questions, or to start a conversation about how we may be of service to you.