This is the concern nobody raises in the meeting. People ask about price, frequency, whether we can do Tuesdays. What a fair number of them are actually turning over is simpler and harder to say out loud: I don’t know these people, and they are going to have keys to my building, alone, at night.
It is a reasonable thing to worry about, and it deserves a better answer than “don’t worry, we’re bonded.” Here is how to actually check.
Start with the one you can verify yourself, for free
Most claims a cleaning company makes about itself cannot be checked. This one can.
California requires janitorial employers to register with the Labor Commissioner, and has done since 1 July 2018. Registration is not a formality — it requires documentation of valid and adequate workers’ compensation insurance, and registered employers must keep three years of employment records covering names, addresses, hours, wages and workers’ compensation information. Operating without valid registration carries a civil penalty of $200 for each calendar day. Continuing to operate after a registration is revoked or suspended is a criminal matter, carrying a fine of not less than $10,000, imprisonment, or both.
Crucially, the Department of Industrial Relations publishes a free, searchable public registry of registered janitorial employers. You can look up any company that has quoted you in about thirty seconds.
If a vendor is not on it, there are two possibilities. They fall under one of the narrow exemptions — window washers and a handful of other categories — in which case they should be able to explain which one and why. Or they are not compliant, which tells you something about the rest of their operation, including the workers’ compensation coverage that registration is supposed to evidence.
Do this first
Search the Labor Commissioner’s janitorial registration database for every company on your shortlist, before the walkthrough. It costs nothing and it narrows the field faster than any question you can ask in a meeting.
One more thing registration brings with it: registered janitorial employers must provide in-person sexual violence and harassment prevention training every two years to all workers, supervisory and non-supervisory. It is a requirement aimed at protecting cleaning workers, who are frequently alone in buildings at night and are a genuinely vulnerable workforce. It is also a reasonable proxy for whether a company runs a real employment operation or an informal one.
What a background check can and cannot tell you in California
“We background check everyone” is the standard reassurance, and it means less than most buyers assume — not because vendors are lying, but because California limits what a check can lawfully report and how it can be used.
In broad terms: convictions can generally only be reported for seven years from disposition, release or parole, with limited exceptions. Arrests that did not lead to conviction cannot be reported. Sealed and expunged records cannot be reported.
Separately, the Fair Chance Act prohibits employers with five or more employees from asking about conviction history before making a conditional offer. If something does come back, the employer must carry out an individualised assessment — weighing the nature and gravity of the offence, how long ago it was, and its relationship to the specific job — and must give the person written notice and at least five business days to respond before any final adverse decision.
None of that is a loophole. It is a deliberate policy, and a sensible one: people who have served a sentence need to be able to work, and blanket exclusions are both unlawful and unfair. But it does mean the honest version of the vendor’s answer is not “we screen everyone out.” It is a description of a documented, lawful process.
So the useful question is not do you run background checks. It is:
Ask
“What does your screening cover, at what point in hiring does it happen, who reviews the results, and how is that decision documented?” A company with a real process answers in specifics. A company without one answers with the word “thorough.”
“Bonded” is weaker than almost anyone realises
This is the part of the article most likely to annoy people in my own industry, and it is the most useful thing in it.
A janitorial or business service bond exists to protect you, the client, if a cleaning company’s employee steals from your premises. Good. But here is the condition buried in a lot of these bonds, in the surety industry’s own words:
“Many business service bond forms pay only after the employee is convicted of the theft — a police report and a prosecution, not just an accusation.”
Think about how that plays out in reality. A laptop goes missing from a locked office. You are fairly confident when it happened. You are not going to get a criminal conviction of a named individual, in most cases you will never establish who it was, and without that conviction a conviction-trigger bond does not pay.
Broader forms exist. A “preponderance of evidence” trigger pays on the balance of probability rather than requiring a prosecution, and it costs the cleaning company meaningfully more premium. Both types are marketed with the same word: bonded.
Ask
“Is your bond a conviction-trigger form or a preponderance-of-evidence form, and what is the limit?” Almost nobody asks this. A vendor who knows the answer immediately is telling you a great deal about how seriously they take the question.
While you are there, separate the three things that get bundled into “bonded and insured,” because they cover completely different events: general liability covers property damage and injury; workers’ compensation covers the cleaner if they are hurt in your building, and its absence can create exposure for you; and the bond covers employee theft, subject to the trigger above. Ask for certificates for all three, issued directly by the broker rather than forwarded as a PDF.
Key and access control: the operational half
Regulation and insurance are the paperwork. What actually determines your exposure is how the vendor handles access, and this is where the questions get concrete.
- Who physically holds keys, and where do they live between shifts? A named individual and a controlled location, not “the crew has them.”
- Is there a key log? Issued to whom, on what date, returned when. If it is not written down, it is not controlled.
- Master keys. Does anyone need one? Most cleaning scopes do not, and a vendor who assumes a master is being lazy rather than thorough.
- Alarm codes. Individual codes per person, not one shared code. Individual codes mean the log tells you who was in the building. A shared code means it never can.
- Arrival and departure logging, and whether you get access to it.
- Identification. Uniforms and photo ID, and a way for your staff or security to confirm someone is meant to be there.
- Subcontracting. Ask directly whether any part of your scope will be performed by anyone other than the company’s own employees, and require notification if that changes. This is the single most common gap between what a buyer thinks they bought and what walks through the door.
And when someone leaves
Given how much movement there is in this workforce, the offboarding process matters more than the onboarding one, and it is almost never discussed.
Ask
“A crew member resigns on a Friday. Walk me through what happens to their key, their alarm code and their building access before Monday.”
If the answer is fluent, they have done it many times and have a process. If it is improvised on the spot, you have learned something important.
The honest limit
No cleaning company can guarantee that nothing will ever go missing from your building. Any vendor who tells you otherwise is either inexperienced or not being straight with you, and that includes us.
What a vendor can offer is a system you can inspect: registration you can verify yourself, screening that is documented and lawful, insurance and bonding whose actual terms you have read, access control that is logged rather than assumed, and a defined response when something does go wrong — who you call, what they do, and how quickly.
That is a smaller promise than “trust us.” It is the one worth having.
Frequently asked questions
Are commercial cleaning companies required to be licensed in California?
Janitorial employers in California must register with the Labor Commissioner, a requirement in force since 1 July 2018, with a $500 initial fee and $500 annual renewal. Registration requires documentation of valid workers’ compensation insurance and three years of employment records. The Department of Industrial Relations publishes a free searchable registry, so any buyer can verify a provider’s status in under a minute. Operating without valid registration carries a civil penalty of $200 per calendar day.
What does it mean when a cleaning company says it is bonded?
A janitorial or business service bond is intended to compensate the client if the cleaning company’s employee steals from the premises. The important detail is the trigger: many bond forms pay only after the employee is criminally convicted of the theft, which rarely happens in practice. Broader preponderance-of-evidence forms exist at higher premium. Ask which form your vendor carries and what the limit is.
Can a cleaning company tell me about its employees’ background checks?
Not the individual results — those are confidential. What a vendor can and should describe is the process: what the screening covers, at what stage of hiring it happens, who reviews it, and how decisions are documented. California limits conviction reporting to roughly seven years and prohibits reporting arrests without conviction or sealed and expunged records, and the Fair Chance Act requires an individualised assessment before any adverse decision.
What key control should I require from a cleaning company?
A written key log recording issue and return by named individual, keys stored in a controlled location rather than held loosely by crew, individual alarm codes per person rather than one shared code, no master key unless the scope genuinely requires it, arrival and departure logging you can access, photo identification and uniforms, and a documented offboarding process covering keys, codes and access when someone leaves.
Ask us all of it
JAN-PRO Commercial Cleaning in Sacramento works with offices, medical practices, schools and industrial facilities across the Capital Region. Before you talk to us, look us up on the Labor Commissioner’s registry — we would rather you checked than took our word for it.
Our free facility visit takes about twenty minutes, and it is a reasonable time to work through every question in this article, including the ones about the bond. If another provider answers them better, that is useful information too.
Call (916) 376-8977 or request a facility visit online.