The certificate of insurance, and what to actually read on it
Ask for a COI before anyone starts, not after. It should come from the insurer or the broker rather than from the cleaning company's own files, and there are four things on it worth your attention.
- General liability, and the limit. A million per occurrence is the common floor for commercial work.
- Workers' compensation. This is the one that matters most and the one most often missing.
- Your entity named as additional insured — spelled the way your lease spells it, not approximately.
- The expiry date. Put it in your calendar. A COI that lapsed eight months ago is a piece of paper.
Why workers' comp is the question that matters
If someone cleaning your building is injured in your building and there is no workers' compensation behind them, the question of who is responsible does not stay unanswered for long. It is the single largest uninsured exposure in hiring a cleaning company and it is invisible until it is not.
The follow-up question is who the crew actually works for. Plenty of cleaning companies subcontract, which is fine and normal — this business does it openly — but it means the coverage has to be current on the subcontractor too, not just on the company whose name is on your invoice. Ask how that is tracked. "We check it annually" and "nobody gets assigned without current coverage on file" are different answers.
The rest of the paperwork
Less dramatic, still worth having before the first visit:
- A W-9, so your accounts team is not chasing it in January.
- Business licence for the jurisdiction the work is in — DC, Virginia and Maryland are three separate answers, and so is California.
- The written scope, signed. Not the proposal, the scope.
- The notice period and whether the contract auto-renews.
- A named contact with a phone number that is answered outside business hours, because cleaning problems happen outside business hours by definition.
Building requirements are a separate list
In a managed building, your landlord has its own contractor requirements and they are frequently stricter than yours — higher insurance limits, an approved-vendor process, badge applications with lead times measured in weeks.
Ask property management for their contractor packet at the same time you start getting quotes. It is the item most likely to delay a start date, and it is entirely predictable.