Most cleanings happen while the customer is somewhere else. You leave for work, someone lets themselves in, and by the time you come home the flat smells of soap and you have no idea what actually happened in it.
That is normal in this industry, and it is a bad arrangement for everyone. You cannot tell whether you got what you paid for. The cleaning company cannot prove it did. And if something in the flat was already damaged, there is no record of when it happened.
Here is how to check the work properly.
1. Check the places that get skipped, not the places that look clean
A visibly tidy room tells you very little. The work that separates a real cleaning from a quick pass is almost never the part you notice first:
- Behind and under the toilet, not just the bowl
- The top edge of doors and skirting boards
- Inside the microwave and the oven door glass
- The rubber seal of the washing machine and the fridge
- Under the sofa and the bed, not just the visible floor
- Window sills, radiator tops and light switches
If those are done, the rest almost certainly was too.
2. Ask for before and after photos
This is the single most useful thing you can ask a cleaning company for, and surprisingly few provide it.
Photos do three things at once. They show you the result without you having to inspect anything. They show the state the room was in before, which protects you from being blamed for damage you did not cause — and protects the cleaners from the same. And they make it very hard for a cleaning to be quietly half-done.
A company that photographs its own work is a company that expects to be checked. That is the point.
3. Ask what happens when something goes wrong
Things do go wrong. A stain does not come out. An appliance was already broken. The team could not get into a room. What matters is whether you hear about it that day, in writing, or whether it quietly disappears.
Ask directly: if your team finds a problem in my home, how do I find out? If the answer is “they will tell the office”, that is not an answer.
4. Ask who is coming
You are giving someone access to your home. Knowing their name before they arrive is not an unreasonable thing to want, and a company that cannot tell you is a company that does not know either.
How we do it
We are a cleaning company in Copenhagen, and we built our own customer portal, ServiceTrack, largely because of this problem.
Every customer gets an account with their booking. Inside it you see the team assigned to your address with names and photos, before and after photos of the work, and a written note with a photo any time we find something we think you should know about — damage, a stain we could not remove, something that blocked us from finishing properly. It is dated and it stays there.
You do not have to use it. Plenty of customers never log in. But it exists so that the answer to “how do I know it was done?” is not “you have to trust us”.
See our cleaning services in Copenhagen, or read more about how ServiceTrack works.
