A recurring service agreement is usually one or two pages, often a form the company has used for years, and it is signed at a kitchen table in about ninety seconds. The disputes that follow it are strikingly consistent, and every one of them traces back to a line that was not there.
Four lines carry most of the weight.
One: the scope, written as a schedule rather than a paragraph
"General cleaning of the property" is not a scope. It is a description of a category, and it leaves both parties to fill in the specifics from their own expectations, which will differ.
What works is a table with a frequency against each task. Floors every visit. Interior windows quarterly. Inside the refrigerator on request. Baseboards monthly. Blinds twice a year.
The value is not in the detail for its own sake. It is that a schedule makes the difference between a missed task and a task that was never included into a five-second check rather than an argument. It also protects the cleaner, who currently absorbs every expansion of an undefined scope.
Write down the exclusions too. Exterior windows, anything requiring a ladder above a set height, pet waste, biohazards, and moving heavy furniture are the usual ones, and they are excluded for reasons of insurance and injury rather than reluctance.
Two: supplies, equipment and who pays for them
Three arrangements exist and each is fine. The service brings everything. The household supplies everything. Or the service brings equipment and the household supplies products, which is common where someone has preferences about what is used on a surface.
Say which, in the agreement. Then say what happens when something runs out, because the practical failure is a visit where the work could not be done properly and nobody agreed in advance whose problem that was.
If you have surfaces that need particular treatment, and stone counters, unsealed wood and certain floor finishes all do, that belongs in writing rather than in a conversation with whoever came the first time. Crews change.
Three: access, keys and who is actually in the house
The agreement should say how entry happens: a key held by the company, a lockbox, a code, or someone home. If a key is held, it should say who holds it, how it is stored, and what happens to it when the agreement ends.
Ask two questions that are rarely on the form. Whether the people doing the work are employees of the company or subcontractors, and whether background checks are run. Neither answer is disqualifying by itself. Both change what you are agreeing to, and a company comfortable with the questions answers them in a sentence.
If you are hiring an individual directly rather than a company, understand that you may be a household employer, with obligations for payroll taxes above a modest annual threshold. That is a different arrangement with different paperwork, and the IRS sets the thresholds that decide when it applies.
Four: insurance, damage and the process when something breaks
The single most useful clause in the document, and the one most often missing.
Ask for a certificate of insurance showing general liability, and workers' compensation if there are employees. This is not a formality: if an uninsured worker is injured in your home, the claim may land on your homeowners policy, and the amounts involved are not small.
Bonding is a separate thing from insurance and covers theft by an employee. It is worth having and worth understanding as narrow.
Then the process. A good agreement says damage should be reported within a stated number of days, that the company will respond within a stated number, and how repair or replacement is handled. Without it, a broken lamp becomes a negotiation between a homeowner and a crew member who is not authorized to settle anything.
The commercial terms people skim
Three of them, and they decide what the arrangement costs over years rather than months.
Price escalation: whether the rate can rise, by how much and with how much notice. An annual adjustment with thirty days' notice is normal. An open-ended right to change the price is not.
Cancellation: how much notice each side gives, and whether there is a minimum term. Month to month with two weeks' notice is the common shape. Anything longer should buy you something.
Missed and rescheduled visits: what happens when a crew cannot come, and what happens when you are away. A credit, a make-up visit, or nothing, but it should say.
The trial worth asking for
Ask for the first two visits to be priced individually rather than committing to a term. Most companies will agree, because they would rather find out early too, and the first visit of a recurring arrangement is always longer than the ones that follow.
Use those two visits to learn the things a contract cannot tell you. Whether the same people come each time, which matters more than any clause. Whether they arrive in the window they said. Whether the work is done in the same order each visit, which is what a trained crew looks like.
Then sign for a term if the price is better for one, and put the schedule you agreed in the folder with the agreement. A year later, when a new crew is doing three-quarters of the list, that page is the whole conversation.
Making the first month do the work
Walk the property with whoever will manage the account before the first visit, list in hand, and agree what is in and out while you are both looking at the room. Twenty minutes there prevents most of what would otherwise surface in month four.
Then check the work against the schedule after the second visit rather than the first, when the crew knows the property, and say plainly what you would like different. Almost every long-running arrangement of this kind was adjusted early by somebody willing to have one specific conversation, and almost every one that ended badly involved a homeowner who said nothing for six months and then canceled.