Cleaning plan: example and template you can use today

A cleaning plan is the document that says what is cleaned, where, how often, by whom, and to which result. Without it, cleaning becomes something that "just happens", and nobody knows whether what happens is right.

Here you get a concrete example for an office building, and a template you can adapt. At the end we show how the plan can be created directly from the floor plan, so you can skip the spreadsheet.

What a cleaning plan must contain

A plan that actually gets used answers five questions:

1. Where? Which rooms or room types the plan covers.
2. What? Which tasks are done in each room.
3. How often? Frequency per task, not per room.
4. Who? Which team or person is responsible.
5. Which result? The quality level the room should have afterwards, preferably according to INSTA 800.

The last point is missing from most plans. Then the plan describes activity, but not what the activity should lead to.

Example: cleaning plan for an office building

The building has four floors, 62 rooms and roughly 2,400 m². Cleaning is delivered by an external contractor on weekdays.

Room types and quality level

Tasks and frequency

Office (level 3)

Toilet (level 4)

Meeting room (level 4)

Storage and technical room (level 2)

Responsibility

• Daily tasks: cleaning team A, 06:00–09:00
• Weekly and less frequent tasks: distributed on the weekly plan by the team leader
• Inspection: self-inspection every week, INSTA 800 inspection every month

Periodic cleaning

Some tasks do not belong in the weekly plan:

• Deep clean of all rooms: once a year (July)
• Interior window cleaning: twice a year
• Floor polishing in corridors: once a year

These belong in an annual wheel, so they are not forgotten.

Template: cleaning plan

We have made a ready-to-use Excel template you can download and start with right away. It is free and needs no login.

Download the cleaning plan template (Excel)

The template is a small workbook with eight sheets (in Norwegian):

• Renholdsplan (cleaning plan): one room per row, with drop-down lists for room type and INSTA 800 level. Mark the weekdays the room is cleaned with an "x", and frequency, time per visit, hours per year and cost are calculated for you.
• Årshjul (annual wheel): periodic tasks such as deep cleaning and window cleaning, with an x per month and a count of tasks per month at the bottom.
• Kalkyle (estimate): annual price, monthly price, price per m² and full-time equivalents, calculated from your rooms and the rates in the settings sheet.
• Kontroll (inspection): enter the number of rooms and get the sample size and acceptance number for an INSTA 800 inspection according to ISO 2859-1. The same table CleanFlow uses. Plus a simple inspection log that concludes for the lot.
• Erfaringstall (experience figures): log actual time per room and see actual min/m² per room type against your rate. Red when rooms take longer than you price.
• Innstillinger (settings): hourly cost with social costs, set-up time, consumables, transport, margin and productivity rates per room type. Everything can be changed.
• Eksempel (example): a fully filled-in office building with 18 rooms to use as a model.
• Start: a short guide and the colour codes.

The "Renholdsplan" sheet also imports straight into CleanFlow through "Import room list" on the survey. Room number, room type, area, floor, INSTA 800 level and frequency are read automatically.

Five mistakes we see often

1. Frequency per room, not per task. "Office: daily" does not say what is done daily.
2. No quality level. Then it is impossible to say whether the plan works.
3. The plan lives in a spreadsheet nobody opens. The cleaner does not have it with them.
4. Periodic cleaning is missing. Deep cleaning and window cleaning "we will get back to".
5. The plan is not updated when rooms change use. The meeting room that became an office still gets meeting-room cleaning.

From floor plan to plan

The biggest job with a cleaning plan is counting rooms, measuring square metres and finding out which room types the building has. That is where the spreadsheet grows and the errors appear.

In CleanFlow the plan starts with the floor plan. You upload the drawing, the rooms are detected automatically with square metres, and you set a room type on each room. The task templates per room type give frequency and quality level, and the plan generates the tasks for the team. The cleaner gets today's rooms on their phone, and the plan updates when a room changes type.

Nor does the plan have to be fixed forever. With sensors on dispensers and in rooms, tasks are added where use is high, and the frequency can be lowered where rooms stand empty.

The plan lives on in operations. The cleaner checks out a room, a floor or the whole building by scanning a QR code, with time and position stored, and the time per task is logged in the app. The actual time flows back into the task templates as minutes per m², so the next plan and the next quote are built on numbers from your own buildings. See the checklist for cleaning apps.

Frequently asked questions

How detailed should the plan be? Detailed enough that a new cleaner can do the job right on day one. No more.

Should the frequency be in the contract? With INSTA 800 the contract can describe the result, and the contractor owns the frequency. Without INSTA 800 the frequency should be in the contract.

How often should the plan be revised? When the building changes, and otherwise once a year.

Want to build the cleaning plan from the floor plan instead of in a spreadsheet? See how CleanFlow does it, or try it free for 14 days.