The scheduled clean: what a visit covers, and what closes it

A visit is a measured thing

A visit is defined before it is booked: the rooms it is to cover, the minutes each of those rooms takes, and the hours the visit runs for. Those three figures decide how many visits a full cycle takes, and they are written down rather than carried in anybody's head.

Minutes per room are set against the room as it actually is, not as an average of the floor. A meeting room with a long table and a stacked chair store does not take what a cellular office takes, and a floor costed on the average of the two is short on half of it.

Rooms

The named rooms on the floor, counted individually. A corridor is a room for this purpose if it is cleaned as one.

Minutes

The working minutes a room takes, set against that room. Rooms that differ get different figures rather than one floor average.

Hours

The length of the visit. Everything else follows from it, which is why it is stated first and changed deliberately.

Cycle

The number of visits it takes to cover every room once. A cycle closes when the last room has been covered, not when the last hour has been used.

What a visit covers

General cleaning of buildings is the work: floors, surfaces, washrooms and waste, in the order a round is walked. The consumables that the work uses come off the same standing order as everything else, so a visit never arrives at a building and finds the shelf it depends on empty.

1. Washrooms first. They are the rooms whose state is noticed first and the rooms whose consumables run down fastest, so they are covered while the visit still has its full hours in front of it.
2. Surfaces, room by room. Worked against the room list, with the colour-coded cloth set, so a room is either covered or not covered rather than partly done.
3. Floors last on the round. Floors are done after the surfaces above them, because a floor cleaned first is a floor cleaned twice.
4. Waste out on the way. Sacks are changed as the round leaves each area rather than collected at the end, so nothing stands in a cleaned room.

What closes a visit

A visit closes on a written count: the rooms covered, the rooms left for the next visit, and the on-call consumable counts taken while the round was walked. That count is what the next visit starts from and what the next consignment is built from, which is why it is written at the building rather than afterwards.

Where a room could not be covered — it was occupied, or locked — it stays on the list for the next visit with the reason beside it. A room carried forward twice is raised with the building rather than carried a third time.

Where the figures themselves turn out to be wrong, the figures are changed. A room that consistently takes longer than its stated minutes has its minutes corrected, and the cycle is reworked from the corrected figure. The sheet is a record of what is actually happening, and a sheet that is quietly worked around stops being one.