Being a leader in Boston office cleaning affords us the opportunity to answer a lot of questions for potential clients. One of the stranger questions we get now and again goes something like this: “Can my company write off cleaning costs as a business expense?”
The best and most accurate answer we can offer is that we don’t know. Here at All Pro Cleaning Systems, we are not tax experts. We are commercial cleaning experts. It would be up to a company’s accountant or tax advisor to answer the write-off question.
However, our inability to answer the question directly does not mean it’s a topic we won’t entertain. It is still a good question because it gives us the opportunity to compare cleaning services with tax preparation.
Having a Plan Is Good
Let us compare office cleaning with tax accounting. A consistent piece of advice accountants are known to offer their clients is to have a plan. A tax plan is crucial to limiting a company’s liabilities. It is crucial to mitigating risks and preventing errors. The same holds true for office cleaning.
Handling office cleaning tasks without a plan doesn’t make sense. It would be like having no tax prep plan and then going into the annual tax season and hope that you will get it right. Effective office cleaning requires planning ahead of time. A good plan limits mistakes. It ensures a more thorough job. It keeps everyone on the same page.
A Bit of Flexibility Is Also Good
Tax and cleaning plans have a lot in common, including the need to be flexible. Circumstances change. So do resources, needs, budgets, etc. So just as your accountant would encourage you to be flexible with your tax plan, be equally flexible with your cleaning plan.
A cleaning plan is a guideline. It’s a baseline for figuring out what is going to be cleaned, how often it will be cleaned, and the process necessary to get the job done. But things can always interrupt the plan. Maybe a special event requires the cleaning crew to do something different. Perhaps the entire plan needs to be scaled up to account for a growing business.
Flexibility doesn’t have to mean a lower quality cleaning job. In fact, it shouldn’t – especially when you are paying a company like All Pro Cleaning Systems to handle office cleaning.
There’s More to It Than Meets the Eye
There are so many more comparisons we could make but don’t have the space for. So the last one we’ll offer is this: where both taxes and cleaning are concerned, there is more to it than meets the eye.
For example, did you know that writing off cleaning costs as a business expense does not equal a tax reduction of the same amount? You will not reduce your tax bill by $12k by writing off $12k and cleaning costs. Instead, writing off those costs reduces your taxable income by that amount. How much you actually save in taxes is another matter.
Likewise, it’s easy to assume that office cleaning is little more than vacuuming the carpets, emptying the trash, and cleaning the restrooms. Dig deeper and you will discover that a truly clean office requires a whole lot more than surface cleaning.
We cannot tell you whether cleaning costs can be written off as a business expense. That is a question for your accountant to answer. But we can recommend that you develop a cleaning plan, maintain a willingness to be flexible, and refuse to settle for mere surface cleaning alone – especially if you’re paying for professional office cleaning in Boston.
