Why Your Childcare Cleaner Should Give You a Client Portal
Think about the last time you needed something from your cleaning company. It might have been an SDS for a new product, a list of who cleans at night, or whether the sleep room was done on Thursday. You probably sent an email or left a voicemail and waited. If an authorised officer was standing in the office at the time, the wait felt longer.
For a childcare centre, almost every question about cleaning has a document or a record behind it. Those records belong to your centre's compliance as much as to the cleaner's operations. A client portal is simply the cleaner giving you a window into them, all the time, without asking.
What a good portal should show
Documents, current and in one place
The documents a centre needs on the spot are the scope of works, the contract, safety data sheets and the cleaners' screening details. We listed all of them in the cleaning documents a centre should be able to produce.
They are only useful if they are current. A portal should hide documents once they expire, and the cleaning company should know before they do.
Who cleans your centre
Names, and their Working with Children Check details: number, issuing state, expiry, and a way to check it online yourself. That is what your child safe policy needs.
It should also be the list of people who actually attend your centre, not everyone the company employs.
Proof that each clean happened
You should be able to see which days are cleaned, when the last clean was and when the next one is due, without ringing anyone. The record should be made at the time, at your building, not filled in afterwards.
Inspection results
If the provider says a supervisor checks the work, you should see the results: the score, the notes and the photos.
Requests, and what happened to them
When the toddler toilets are missed, you should be able to report it, see the reply and know when it was fixed. That log is useful in your quality improvement plan, and it stops the same problem being raised three times.
One-off jobs
An outbreak clean, a carpet extraction before assessment, a holiday deep clean. You should be able to see what has been booked and whether it has been done.
Why it matters more in childcare
Regulators ask without notice. Assessors, authorised officers and council officers ask "show me". A centre that can open a page on the office computer answers in seconds.
Directors don't have time to chase. Every email to the cleaner is time away from the floor. A portal turns most of those emails into a two-minute look.
Families ask too. "What do you clean the cots with?" is a fair question. The SDS should be easy to find.
Problems get fixed faster when they are written down. A request in a shared system can't get lost in someone's inbox.
What our portal does
Every centre we clean can have a login to the Star Shining client portal for the people it nominates, each seeing only their own sites. Through it, a centre can:
- Open its documents: scope of works, contract and safety data sheets. Expired documents are hidden automatically, and our office is reminded 30 days before anything expires.
- See its cleaners' checks: name, Working with Children Check number, issuing state and expiry for each cleaner we list at the site, with a link to the state's online check. Certificates themselves are shared only with the cleaner's consent, because they carry personal details.
- Read supervisor inspections once our supervisor publishes them, with the score, notes and photos.
- See its cleaning days, the last clean and the next one, and a month calendar of cleans recorded by our sign-in app. Each visit is signed in and out inside a geofence around the building.
- Raise requests and follow the conversation with our office until the problem is fixed. A note on a closed request reopens it.
- Track one-off jobs from booking to done.
Contacts also get an email when a request is resolved, an inspection is published or a job is booked or completed, and a monthly summary on the 1st. Most directors never need to log in to know where things stand.
Some features are switched on for each site once we are confident the record is complete. We would rather a centre saw nothing than saw a gap that wasn't real.
Ask your current cleaner
You don't need to switch providers to get some of this. Ask your current cleaner which of these records they can give you access to today. If the answer is "email us and we'll send it", you know where you stand.
If you would like to see the portal for yourself, ask for a walkthrough and we will show you a centre's view. Our medical and childcare cleaning page explains the rest of how we work.