Commercial cleaning contract software: a UK guide

Last updated: August 2026

It is ten to five and a cleaner has posted in the area group to say she cannot make it. Her round is three offices starting at five, and one is the building the client’s facilities manager walks through at eight.

You have fifty minutes to find somebody free tonight who is inducted on that site and can get the key. There is no customer at the door to apologise to. If nobody goes, the bins stay full and everybody who works there finds out before you do.

This guide is contract cleaning for businesses: rounds against a written specification, several sites, several cleaners, billed monthly. Regular domestic work is a different business with its own guide, software for domestic cleaners.

You do not win a contract, you inherit a workforce

Most trades win the work and then find the people. Contract cleaning does it the other way round: when a client changes contractor the cleaners usually transfer to the incoming firm by operation of law, and losing one works the same way in reverse.

The mechanism is the service provision change at regulation 3(1)(b) of TUPE: activities that stop being carried out by one contractor and are carried out instead by a subsequent one. The deciding condition in regulation 3(3) is an organised grouping of employees situated in Great Britain whose principal purpose is that client’s work. A nightly office clean with a named cleaner is the textbook case, and GOV.UK names cleaning as a service caught by it.

So you bid on a payroll you have not seen. Transferring staff keep their existing terms, which cannot be harmonised down afterwards, so two cleaners on one site can sit on very different rates.

Regulation 11 is meant to close the gap: identity and age, the written employment particulars, two years of disciplinary and grievance action, and live or expected tribunal claims. It must arrive not less than 28 days before the transfer.

The 28 days is Great Britain, not the UK, and most writing on this gets that wrong. Northern Ireland has its own Service Provision Change (Protection of Employment) Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2006, untouched by the 2014 and 2023 GB amendments, so the position there is as Great Britain’s was before 2014. Separately, since 1 July 2024 a GB business with fewer than 50 staff, or any transfer of fewer than 10 people, may consult employees directly where no representatives exist.

None of it helps when it matters: the bid is priced months earlier, on whatever anonymised data the client released at tender.

Cover, with nobody at the site to apologise to

Absence is the operational problem of this trade, and different in kind from a missed appointment. The failure is discovered hours later, by the client, from the state of the building, and by every person who works there.

Sickness is reported between four and six for a five o’clock start, usually into a group chat. The office then has under an hour to answer four questions at once: who is free, who is trained for that site, who has the key and the code, and who can get there. A rota spreadsheet answers the first and none of the rest.

Shuffling a round is not free either. Under the minimum wage rules, travel between work assignments counts as paid working time, though home to first site and last site to home do not. A cleaner doing three small sites in an evening is owed the two hops in between, so a round costed as three separate hours underpays by law.

Statutory Sick Pay is a flat weekly rate payable for up to 28 weeks. From 6 April 2026 the three waiting days and the lower earnings limit test both go, and SSP becomes the lower of the flat rate or 80% of normal weekly earnings. A part-time, low-hours workforce previously drew nothing for a one-day absence. Now one missed shift is paid twice.

If nobody covers, the specification is breached, and most contracts hang a rectification process and eventually a termination right off exactly that.

The wage floor rises every April and the contract price does not

A cleaning contract is priced from labour hours, not a day rate. You survey the building, measure areas by type, apply productivity rates in square metres per hour, convert to hours per visit, then cost those hours with employer’s National Insurance, pension, holiday, sick pay provision, cover, supervision, materials and overhead, add margin and quote a monthly figure.

Everything rests on the hours being right. If the survey says two hours and the site takes two and a half, you lose a quarter of that site’s labour cost every night for the life of the contract.

Against that, the National Minimum Wage and National Living Wage rates change on 1 April every year, and the rate for workers aged 21 and over has been £12.71 since April 2026. Contracts run one to three years at a fixed monthly price, so without an indexation clause every April is a cut to margin, negotiated under the shadow of re-tender.

There is a second floor. The real Living Wage is a separate voluntary standard set by the Living Wage Foundation, with a higher London figure and its own implementation deadline in the spring rather than on 1 April. Many public sector, university and corporate tenders now require it, so check the current figures on the Foundation’s own site before you price.

Keys, alarm codes and the leaver problem

Every site has a key, most have a code, and the workforce turns over. When a cleaner leaves, or transfers out under TUPE, you need to know which keys they hold and which codes they know, recover the one and change the other. A lost key to a master-suited lock system can mean re-suiting the suite at your cost.

Key holding is a licensable activity under Schedule 2 of the Private Security Industry Act 2001, and plenty of cleaning content stops there and tells contractors they need an SIA licence. Paragraph 6(3) says otherwise: it does not apply where the key is held for access incidental to providing services that are not the activities of a security operative. Holding a client’s key so your cleaners can get in is exactly that.

The boundary moves if you sell alarm response as a service in its own right. That is not incidental to cleaning, and it is a point to take advice on rather than assume.

The practical consequence of the exemption is that no regulator is checking your register, which is why it is usually kept badly. The contract still requires one: which key is with which cleaner and when it came back, codes changed when someone leaves, keyholder details lodged with the client and the alarm receiving centre, and a written process for a lost key.

Night work, lone working and the file a client asks for tomorrow

Because most of this work happens in an empty building, three sets of rules apply that cleaning software content rarely mentions.

Night working hours rules bite when someone regularly works at least three hours in the night period, which is 11pm to 6am by default. Night workers must not average more than eight hours in each 24, a limit nobody can opt out of, and hours records are kept for two years. Employers must also offer a free health assessment before someone becomes a night worker. A 5pm office clean is not night work; a 4am retail clean is.

Lone working is not prohibited, but HSE expects the risks managed before anyone works alone, and names cleaners among lone workers. That means a documented answer per site: how do we know she arrived, how do we know she left, and what happens if she does not check out.

Regulation 6 of COSHH requires a suitable and sufficient assessment before work liable to expose employees to a hazardous substance, and at five or more employees the significant findings must be recorded. HSE identifies wet work as a primary cause of the trade’s signature illness, contact dermatitis.

All of it converges on the pack a client or an insurer asks for at a day’s notice, per site: COSHH assessments and current safety data sheets, risk assessments and method statements, training and PPE records, night worker hours and health assessments, minimum wage records (kept for at least six years), and vetting evidence for schools. On vetting, DBS guidance turns on frequency plus the opportunity for contact, so an after-hours cleaner is often outside regulated activity while the school asks for a check anyway.

How Dispatch helps

Dispatch handles the work that hangs off the contract: the reactive callout, the periodic programme, the summer deep clean and the quoted extra that arrives as a message at nine at night.

Each becomes a job record with the site address, the assignee, the priority, the status, the booked visit and notes. Quote it with line items, VAT and a validity period, and the client accepts by typing their name on a link with no login, so an extra is authorised in writing rather than agreed in a corridor. Invoice from the phone, with card payment landing in your own Stripe account.

A completion report with a written summary and up to twelve photographs is required before a job can be marked completed, and every completed job for a customer is browsable grouped by site address, so a client with nine buildings reads as nine histories. That is the evidence a periodic clean is worth what you charge for it. Certificates, RAMS and method statements attach as PDFs, images or Word files up to 25 MB, kept for the life of the job.

Recurring visits, money records and automatic chasing of overdue invoices at 3, 10 and 21 days are each switched on in Settings.

Every feature is on every plan, everything runs in the UK, and there is a free plan to try on one site’s periodic programme.