Once a contract starts, requests to add something rarely stop. A staff gym gets added to the building. A client asks if you can "just quickly do" the boardroom before client visits. A new storeroom needs including. None of these are unreasonable requests — but handled casually, every one of them is unpriced labour quietly absorbed into a margin that was never built to cover it.
This is different from How to Build a Commercial Cleaning Scope of Work, which covers building the original scope. This article covers what happens after the contract has already started.
Why "just add this" is a margin problem
A single small add-on rarely feels worth pushing back on in the moment. The problem is cumulative — a handful of unpriced additions over a year can add up to real labour time that was never accounted for in the original price, and by the time it's noticeable, it's hard to unwind without an awkward conversation.
A simple process for handling requests
Assessing before you agree
Treat a scope-change request the same way you'd treat any new labour: work out roughly how much extra time it adds per visit, and what (if any) extra supplies or access it needs. A gym area three times a week is a different commitment to a single desk added to the daily round — both are fine to agree to, but only one of them needs a price attached.
Pricing it — even a small change
Small, genuinely minor additions can sometimes be absorbed as goodwill — that's a judgement call. Anything beyond trivial should be priced, even roughly, using the same labour-and-cost logic as the original quote. Run the additional hours through the Quote & Profit Calculator to see what it's actually worth before agreeing to it.
Updating the scope, not just your memory
An agreement made over the phone or in a hallway conversation has a way of getting fuzzy months later — was the gym daily or three times a week? Adding the change to the actual scope document, rather than relying on memory or a buried email thread, keeps it as part of the record both you and the client can refer back to.
Use the Free Scope Builder to add the new area or task to your existing scope cleanly, rather than tracking changes in a separate document.