Choosing a cleaner for a Fairfield premises open to public scrutiny

Write down what matters and roughly how much before any figures arrive. Scope coverage, staffing and supervision, evidence of insurance and screening, the fault-response arrangement, and price. Five headings is usually enough. Setting them in advance protects the process from the natural pull of the lowest number, and it gives you something concrete to point to when somebody asks why the cheapest option was not chosen.

Share the criteria with the bidders if you can. It costs you nothing and it improves the responses, because providers then address the things you actually care about instead of guessing. It also removes a common complaint after an unsuccessful bid, which is that the decision turned on something nobody had been told would be considered at all and had no opportunity to address during their proposal.

Issue the same written brief to each provider, host the walkthroughs on comparable terms, and circulate any clarification to all of them rather than only to the one who asked. This is straightforward to do and it is the single thing most likely to be questioned later. A bidder who learns that another was given extra information has a legitimate complaint, and the answer needs to be that nobody was.

Keep a short log: who was invited, when they attended, what questions were asked and what answers were sent to whom. A page is enough. Its value is that it converts a series of conversations into a documented process, which is the difference between a decision you can explain and one you can only defend by recalling what you remember happening from a set of conversations several months earlier.

When the proposals are scored, write a sentence or two against each heading for each bidder. Not a formal evaluation report, simply the reason. One proposal covered the periodic work explicitly, another was silent on supervision, a third was cheapest but did not include consumables. Those notes take twenty minutes and they answer almost every question that arises afterwards about how the ranking was reached.

Also record any relationship worth declaring. If a bidder is known to somebody involved in the decision, note it and say how it was managed. Declaring a connection costs nothing and protects everyone, including the provider. Discovering an undeclared one later is damaging out of all proportion to the actual influence it may or may not have had on the outcome on the decision that was eventually reached.