Janitorial and cleaning business insurance in Spokane

Care, custody and control

This is the exclusion that bites cleaning contractors. General liability covers damage to a client’s property in general, but most forms exclude property in your care, custody or control — and a building you hold the keys to, working in it alone at night, is arguably exactly that. How broadly a carrier applies that exclusion varies a great deal between forms, which is a real reason to compare wording rather than price alone.

Janitorial bonds are not insurance

Clients routinely ask cleaning contractors to be “bonded and insured”, and the bond they mean is a janitorial service bond covering employee theft from the client. It is inexpensive, it is often a condition of winning commercial contracts, and it is not a liability policy — it protects your client, not you. You need both, and a separate employee dishonesty or crime coverage if you want your own losses covered too.

Wet floors and the sign nobody put out

Slip-and-fall on a freshly cleaned floor is the most frequent liability claim in the trade and the easiest to defend badly. Wet-floor signage, a documented procedure and shift logs showing when areas were cleaned turn a difficult claim into a defensible one. Carriers that write a lot of janitorial will ask about this at application.