Comparing three Castle Hill cleaning proposals that arrive in different formats

Providers write proposals to reflect how they work, not to make comparison easy, and there is no standard format in the industry. One will lead with method, another with price, another with a list of accreditations. Different documents also make different assumptions about what the buyer already knows, so the same information may be explicit in one and merely implied in another that you are reading quickly.

You could insist on a template, and for a large requirement that is worth doing. For a single premises it is usually more effort than it saves, because providers respond to templates with varying enthusiasm and you spend the time chasing compliance rather than reading answers. Extracting the information yourself is faster and has the advantage that you read every document properly while doing it.

Keep the rows to the things that would change your decision. Areas, frequency, hours, periodic items with intervals, who supplies consumables, named exclusions, supervision arrangement, insurance evidence and the price. Ten or so rows is plenty. Adding more produces a table you cannot read across, which defeats the purpose and tends to push you back toward comparing the totals alone and leaves you weighing presentation rather than substance.

Fill it in honestly, including the blanks. The temptation is to infer what a provider probably meant, and that is exactly the habit the exercise is meant to break. If a proposal does not say who supplies liners, the cell is empty and the question gets asked. Half the value of the sheet lies in showing you what nobody told you rather than in comparing what they did.

Once the blanks are filled, read across each row rather than down each column. Reading across shows you where the proposals genuinely differ, which is usually in two or three rows rather than everywhere. Those rows are the actual decision. Everything else is presentation, and presentation has almost no relationship to how a premises will look eight months into an arrangement and where the differences are cosmetic rather than material.

Keep the sheet after you decide. It becomes the reference for what you agreed to buy, which is useful when performance is reviewed and invaluable when the person who ran the comparison moves on. A successor inheriting the arrangement can see in one page what was promised, by whom, and on what basis the choice was made at the time without having to reconstruct the reasoning from memory or email threads.