The specification — in German practice the Leistungsverzeichnis, or LV — is the most important document of your cleaning tender, and the one most often missing. Without it you are comparing offers that promise different things: one provider prices the kitchenettes daily, the other not at all; one includes internal glass, the other refers to a variation order. The price difference you then compare is not a difference in service but a misunderstanding with advance notice. This guide shows step by step how to create a specification that produces comparable offers and later holds up as the contractual baseline — whether for an office, a medical practice or a residential building under property management. What the individual service types such as maintenance cleaning and deep cleaning include can be read alongside in our service descriptions; a first price orientation for your key figures comes from the price calculator.
What a specification does — and does not do
A cleaning specification describes conclusively what is to be cleaned in which rooms at which frequency, and how quality will be measured. It is three things at once: the calculation basis for the provider, the yardstick between offers, and later the standard against which you anchor complaints. What it is not: a job description. A good specification fixes the result, not the hand movements — with which tool the professional mops the floor is their craft; that it ends up streak-free and safe to walk on is your requirement.
Step 1: The survey — the room register
The foundation of every specification is a room register: a list of all rooms to be cleaned with area, floor covering and use. It sounds banal and decides the quality of every later offer. Walk the building physically — floor plans age faster than one thinks — and record per room:
- Room number and name (Office 2.14, kitchenette ground floor, gents' WC 1st floor)
- Area in m², ideally from the plan, otherwise measured
- Floor covering (carpet, vinyl, tile, parquet) — it determines method and deep-cleaning interval
- Type of use and special features (visitor traffic, server room with access rules, height-adjustable desks)
Then group into room categories: circulation areas, office areas, sanitary, kitchens/social rooms, special areas. For a specification it is enough to define services per category and regulate deviations individually — nobody reads a specification with forty identical single-room descriptions, and it changes with every refurbishment.
Step 2: Separate the service types
The most common structural mistake is mixing recurring and occasional services. Separate cleanly:
Maintenance cleaning is the recurring routine service on a fixed schedule — it forms the monthly flat rate. Deep cleaning is the intensive, infrequent treatment (restoring coverings, renewing protective coatings), usually once or twice a year, priced separately. Glass cleaning inside and out runs on its own intervals and, depending on the façade, needs its own technology — what belongs to it is described on our glass cleaning page. On-call special services (post-construction cleans, incident cleaning after water damage, graffiti removal) belong in the specification as hourly-rate or unit-price positions, not in the flat rate.
For each service type the specification needs: the scope per room category, the frequency, the service window (when cleaning may take place) and the billing logic.
Step 3: Set intervals — honestly, not maximally
Intervals are the specification's biggest cost lever. The reflex to tick "daily" everywhere makes the tender expensive; the counter-reflex to stretch everything makes the building visibly unkempt and provokes variation orders. A proven rule of thumb: sanitary rooms and kitchenettes daily (hygiene), circulation and entrance areas daily to three times a week (first impression), office areas two to three times a week, secondary areas weekly. How to derive intervals systematically from use and visitor traffic is covered in detail in our guide to cleaning intervals.
Important for comparability: write intervals as a number per week per room category ("office areas: 3×/week"), not as prose ("regularly"). And define how public holidays and company shutdowns are handled — are visits moved, made up or dropped? Each answer is defensible; none of them should be discussed for the first time on the first invoice.
Step 4: Describe results, not hand movements
Formulate services as verifiable results. Instead of "damp-mop floors": "floor coverings free of soiling, streaks and residue; slip safety maintained." Instead of "empty waste bins": "waste containers emptied, liners replaced, collection point properly stocked." The difference shows at acceptance: a result can be accepted or objected to, a hand movement cannot — nobody was standing next to it.
Two exceptions where methods do belong in the specification: hygiene areas where procedures are prescribed — in medical practices, for instance, the requirements from the hygiene plan and RKI-compliant practice cleaning — and material protection, where the wrong chemistry causes damage (natural stone, oiled parquet). There you specify the requirement, not the brand of the product.
Step 5: Quality measurement and the complaint path
A specification without a quality clause is a price list. Fix three things. First, the measurement method: joint walk-throughs at fixed intervals with a scoring system per room category work well in practice; for larger buildings you can orient the system on DIN EN 13549, the standard for measuring cleaning quality. Second, the complaint path: who is notified, within what deadline rectification happens (typical: 24 hours for defects, immediately where hygiene or safety is affected), and what follows repeated non-performance. Third, the documentation: service records per visit, walk-through protocols, and a fixed contact person with a deputy rule on the provider side.
A specification is complete only when it says how quality will be measured. Everything else postpones the quality dispute to the moment it is most expensive.
Step 6: The commercial positions
So that offers become comparable, the commercial terms belong at the end of the specification: contract term and notice periods; a price-adjustment clause (linking to the generally binding tariff wage increases of the industry is customary and legitimate — blanket indexation is not); the provider's evidence obligations on employment and insurance, as compiled in the audit list of our client liability article; rules for keys and alarm systems; and the requirement that the offer states the calculated hours and productivity. That last line looks inconspicuous and works wonders: it makes every calculation checkable.
The most common mistakes — and how to avoid them
Taking areas from the lease. Rented area is not cleaned area. Archive and plant rooms that are never cleaned inflate the calculation; unrecorded outdoor areas are missing from it.
Writing "everything included". A specification that draws no boundaries invites low-ball prices that are later corrected through variations. Clear delineation protects both sides.
Intervals without reference to use. A specification that gives the ground floor with client reception the same intervals as the basement archive pays too much in one place and looks unkempt in the other.
Forgetting the quality clause. See above — the most expensive of these mistakes, because it only shows during the live contract.
Filing the specification away after signature. A specification lives: refurbishments, changed occupancy and new uses belong in it, otherwise in two years the provider is cleaning to a document that no longer describes your building.
Working with a template — properly
A good specification template saves you the structure and the phrasing; it does not do the room register or the interval decisions for you, because that is where your building lives. The sensible way to use a template: adopt the structure and formulations, check every room category against your own floor plan, set intervals deliberately per use instead of waving defaults through — and delete every position that does not apply to your building. A template that passes through the tender unchanged is a sure sign that step 1 was skipped; providers notice it too, and the care in their calculations drops accordingly.
From specification to contract
With the room register, separated service types, honest intervals, result-based descriptions, a quality clause and the commercial positions, you hold a document that does three things at once: it produces offers you can actually compare; it gives the provider the certainty to calculate tightly and still sustainably; and it becomes, unchanged, the schedule to your cleaning contract. If you request a quote on this basis, you receive a calculation against your numbers instead of an estimate on suspicion — and you will recognise the serious provider by the fact that they read your specification, ask questions, and where in doubt honestly challenge a position instead of simply signing everything.