What a Commercial Cleaning Walkthrough Should Cover
The walkthrough is the pricing instrument, not a sales visit. What a vendor should measure, what you should show them, and what makes a number move later.
A commercial cleaning walkthrough is not a sales visit with a tape measure. It is the instrument that produces your price, and if it takes twelve minutes you are going to be renegotiating in month three.
Here is what should happen in one, from both sides of it.
Why square footage alone is not a quote
The arithmetic underneath most commercial pricing is simple. Ours is a base of $150 plus about $0.11 per square foot, which puts a 3,000 sq ft office near $480 per visit before frequency discounts.
That formula is a starting point, not an answer. Two 3,000 sq ft suites in the same building can be genuinely different jobs:
- One has two restrooms, one has five
- One is carpet throughout, one is polished concrete with a tile entry
- One has fourteen desks, one has a lobby that sees ninety visitors a day
- One has a kitchenette, one has a full staff kitchen with a dishwasher
Restrooms are the reason. They are the most labour-dense space in any building, and a restroom-heavy floor plan does not consume more square feet, it consumes more minutes. Square footage prices the walking. The walkthrough prices the work.
What the vendor should be counting
Walk behind them and see whether they write these down. If they do not, the number they hand you is a guess wearing a suit.
Restroom count and fixture count. Not “two restrooms” — two restrooms with six toilets, four urinals and eight sinks. Fixtures are the unit of labour.
Floor inventory by type and area. Carpet, VCT, sealed concrete, luxury vinyl, tile, and roughly how much of each. Hard floor carries a maintenance tail that carpet does not.
Traffic pattern. Where people enter, where they queue, where they eat. In Central Texas, entry areas take a beating that has nothing to do with the tenant: limestone and caliche dust from every construction site in the metro gets walked in on shoes, and it grinds finish off flooring near the door faster than anywhere else in the building.
Trash volume and dumpster location. Twelve desks and a coffee machine is one thing. A dental practice, a food business or a floor that hosts client lunches is another. Ask where the dumpster is and how a cart gets to it — a loading dock two floors down with a key-carded freight elevator adds real time per visit.
Consumables. Dispenser types and brands, and who buys the refills. This is a genuine cost line and it should be settled at the walkthrough, not discovered in month two.
Access. Alarm system, key or fob handling, badging, after-hours building rules, whether a certificate of insurance has to be on file with management first. Downtown Austin high-rises routinely refuse crew access without a COI naming the building, and that approval is days, not hours.
What you should be showing them
The walkthrough works better if you stop treating it as an inspection you might fail.
Show them the space at its worst, not its best. If the breakroom is a problem at 2pm, walk it at 2pm. A vendor who prices a spotless space and then meets the real one will come back for more money, and they will be right to.
Name the complaints you already get. Restrooms running out of paper mid-afternoon is a scope-and-restock problem with a cheap fix. If nobody says it out loud, nobody fixes it.
Point out the excluded areas explicitly. Server rooms, records storage, executive offices, anything with patient files or payroll in it. Excluded is a fine answer. Unmentioned is not.
The questions that change the number
| Question | Why it moves the price |
|---|---|
| How many nights a week? | The biggest single lever on your monthly cost |
| Restroom count, not just size? | Fixtures drive labour more than floor area |
| Hard floor or carpet? | Hard floor adds burnishing, stripping, refinishing |
| Who supplies paper and soap? | A real line item either way |
| Day porter coverage? | Presence is priced by the hour, not by the task |
| Building access rules? | Freight bookings and badge escorts consume paid time |
Red flags during the walkthrough
A price given on the spot without measuring. It is either padded to be safe or it will move.
No written scope offered. Almost every commercial cleaning dispute is a scope argument, not a quality argument. A vendor who will not put frequencies in writing is one who intends to interpret them later.
No questions about your restrooms. The single most reliable tell that someone is quoting off floor area alone.
A multi-year term with a long cancellation window. Read that clause before you read the price.
Leave with these four things
A written scope split by frequency — per visit, weekly, monthly, quarterly. A price with the frequency assumption stated. A consumables answer. And a named human who takes the call when something is wrong.
Our commercial quotes are confirmed after a walkthrough for exactly this reason, and there is no travel charge anywhere in the 14 cities we serve. If you want to make the visit useful, have the restroom count and floor plan ready before we arrive.
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