How to tender a commercial cleaning contract in Australia without buying a fiction

A cleaning tender is easy to run badly. You issue last year’s specification, hold a site inspection that never leaves the foyer, score the glossy submission, and award to the cheapest conforming bid. Six months later the night crew is two people short, the microwave has not been opened since handover, and both sides are quoting a document nobody believed on the day it was priced.

This sits in the contracts and procurement hub because a tender is a buying decision, not a brochure competition. Commercial Cleaners is not a contractor and not a tender adviser. The job of this piece is to stop you purchasing a story.

Expression of interest is not a cheaper RFT

An expression of interest asks who can do the work. A request for tender asks how they will do this work, for what labour, at what price, under what contract. Mixing the two is how you collect prices before you have a specification, and then pretend the prices are comparable.

Use an EOI when you do not know the market: a regional portfolio, a specialised asset, a first-time outsourcing, or a building that has been with one contractor for a decade and the incumbency is the only data you have. Ask for labour model, supervision ratio, relevant sites, industrial instrument, insurance, and whether the work will be subcontracted. Do not ask for a square-metre rate. A rate without rooms, hours and exclusions is fiction with a dollar sign.

Go straight to RFT when you already know three or four contractors who can staff the postcode at night. Spend the time on writing a commercial cleaning specification that a relief cleaner can follow. The market does not need another capability statement. It needs a document it can price without guessing.

If procurement policy demands an EOI, keep it short: capability, geography, labour, conflicts. Then stop. A twenty-page EOI that asks for method statements is an RFT you have not admitted to.

Site inspections that leave the foyer

A site inspection is the only hour a pricing manager can see the rooms the specification forgot. A foyer briefing with biscuits produces foyer prices.

Walk the night-crew route. End-of-trip. Secondary washrooms. The tea point with the domestic dishwasher. The locked partners’ kitchen. The comms room the specification says is in scope and the access system says is not. The store: hot water, slop hopper, whether two trolleys fit.

Give a floor plan with room names that match the specification. Say which rooms are out of bounds, who holds the key, whether the crew must alarm the floor, and which waste streams the building actually runs. If a tenancy was refitted and the plan still shows a paper store, say so before someone prices a paper store.

A forty-level tower with a twenty-minute inspection tells serious contractors to load risk and casual ones to price the stone. Issue a written Q&A. A tender that lives in lift conversations is how two conforming bids describe two jobs.

If the building cannot be inspected after hours, say so. A daylight walk misses the lighting, the security theatre, and the meeting still in the boardroom at 8:40pm. The price will.

Labour hours are the bid. Square metres are a rumour

Australian commercial cleaning is still mostly people with machines. The Cleaning Services Award 2020 sets minimum rates, penalties and classifications for a large part of that labour. A price that cannot be reconciled to hours, classifications and penalties is not a price. It is a wish.

What to ask for in the labour model

Ask for a labour model in the same units you will manage:

• Hours per night, by floor or by zone, not a single weekly blob
• Day attend, if any, as its own line
• Periodic work — high dust, interim carpet, machine scrub — as hours and method, not “included”
• Supervision: who is on site, who is on the phone, who covers Saturday
• Relief: how a sick leading hand is replaced on a Tuesday
• Travel and split shifts, if the crew is running more than one building

Square metres are useful for comparing buildings. They are a poor way to buy a night. A ground-floor lobby on a wet Melbourne week is not a Level 32 tenancy with sixty people and no street dirt. A washroom-heavy floor is not an open plan with a Nespresso. If you insist on a rate per square metre, still require the hours behind it. Then read them.

A two-hour price on a three-and-a-half-hour floor is either under-staffing or a variation you have not budgeted. Do not score that bid as “efficient”. Score it as incomplete, or as a risk you are choosing to carry.

If the incumbent’s hours are the only honest data you have, put them in the tender as information, not as a target. Incumbent hours can be padded. They can also be the reason the building still looks all right. Hiding them and then being surprised that every bid is lighter is a procurement choice.

CAF, modern slavery, and the questions that belong to the buyer you are

The Commonwealth Procurement Rules and the Cleaning Accountability Framework are answers to particular problems — public money, labour exploitation — not decorations for a suburban office RFT.

If you are a Commonwealth entity, or buying as if you were one, use the questions that go with that. CAF is about labour hours, wages, supervision and whether a worker can be heard, not a logo in a submission. Ask for payroll method, a subcontracting map, and how a cleaner raises an underpayment.

The Modern Slavery Act 2018 (Cth) requires certain reporting entities to describe supply-chain risks. Commercial cleaning is routinely named because it is labour-intensive, often subcontracted, and often done at night by people with limited bargaining power. You do not need to be a reporting entity to ask who employs the person holding the mop, whether any of the work is labour-hire, how hours are recorded, and what happens when someone says they were short-paid. A statutory declaration that says “we comply” is not an answer.

A modern-slavery schedule nobody in procurement can explain is worse than four questions you will follow up. The same is true of WHS and insurance certificates that expire the month after commencement. GECA and other product claims belong in the specification if you mean them. A tender that asks for certified chemicals and then scores price at ninety per cent will buy the cheap solvent.

Transition is a scope, not a vibe

The first six weeks are where the fiction is exposed. Keys fail. The store is empty. The incumbent has taken machines that were never yours. The new crew has not been inducted on the alarm.

Write transition into the RFT and score it: induction, cards, chemical register, equipment, first periodic, first joint inspection, stock on night one. A “seamless transition” is not a plan. A named supervisor for the first ten nights is. So is a week-two walk against the specification.

If you are changing contractor because the last one failed, budget a catch-up and say who pays. Otherwise the new price includes a deep clean you did not describe. Australian labour transition is Award, contract and sometimes an enterprise agreement — not a TUPE import. Ask what the incoming contractor will offer existing cleaners. A building that loses everyone who knows the floor on Friday will fail on Monday.

Why the cheapest conforming bid is often a story

Conforming means the envelopes were filled in. It does not mean the hours add up, the supervisor exists, or the transition can be staffed. Australian procurement culture is fond of “lowest price conforming” because it feels defensible. In cleaning it is how you buy a foyer and a complaint file.

Score the things that decide the Tuesday night:

• Labour hours against the specification you wrote
• Supervision you can name
• A method that matches the rooms, not a national SOP
• Evidence of staffing in this postcode at this hour
• A price that survives Award penalties, not one that hopes the Fair Work Ombudsman is busy

Weight price, but not so heavily that a fiction wins. A bid that is far below the field is information. Ask where the hours went. If the answer is “efficiency” and “our systems”, ask again. Systems do not empty a sanitary bin.

What a good cleaning SLA looks like is the document you will live with after award. If the tender did not mention labour-hour floors, rectification windows or how a fail becomes a credit, you will invent them in month four, on the back foot.

Do not run a “best and final” that only asks for a cheaper number. You will get a cheaper number. You will not get more hours. If you must BAFO, ask for a revised labour model as well, and reject a cut that cannot be walked.

Probity is not a reason to ignore arithmetic. You can keep bidders at arm’s length and still refuse to award a price that cannot employ people lawfully. Record why. That is a better audit story than a cheap award you cannot defend to the occupier.

Evaluation that can be explained in a corridor

Use a panel that has walked the building. Sit procurement with facilities and make them write why. Keep criteria short: capability, labour, method, transition, price, the compliance you need. Interview the site supervisor, not the business-development manager. Ask them to brief a two-person crew for Level 14 from the specification. Check references at a building like yours, at the hour the work is done.

Then manage what you bought. Cleaning KPIs that go beyond “looks clean” are how you find out whether the hours showed up. A tender file that closes at award is how a fiction becomes a three-year contract. Write the specification, the SLA and the first joint inspection as if a night crew, an auditor and a tired occupier will all read them. One of them will.