Won the contract, now the spreadsheets arrive
Winning a contract with a housing association, a school trust or a facilities management company is good news for about a day. Then the handover starts. The client sends a spreadsheet of site addresses, some with postcodes missing. The outgoing contractor sends asset lists in their own format, or does not send them at all. Risk assessments arrive as a zip of PDFs with file names that do not match the site list. Access arrangements, keyholders and site contacts come in dribs and drabs by email.
Meanwhile the contract start date is fixed, and the client expects monitoring to begin in the first month. Your planner starts booking visits to sites where nobody yet knows who holds the plant room key.
Why handovers are always messy
- Information comes from several sources: the client, the outgoing contractor and each site.
- Every source uses different site names and references.
- Nobody has a single list of what is still missing for each site.
- Onboarding tasks are shared between sales, operations and admin with no clear owner.
- Sites are scheduled before they are ready, so first visits fail.
The mess is predictable, which means it can be managed with a process rather than heroics.
What a bad first month costs
First impressions are hard to undo. Failed first visits, reports with the wrong site names and engineers ringing the client to ask for keys all tell the client they may have made a mistake. Internally, onboarding pulls your best people off existing clients, who notice.
Gaps left by a rushed handover, such as a missing asset list, cause problems for months afterwards.
An onboarding workflow per site
- The contract's site list is imported and cleaned: addresses standardised and geocoded, duplicates flagged, and a consistent site reference assigned that maps to the client's own references.
- Each site gets an onboarding checklist: contacts, access and keyholders, induction requirements, asset list, existing risk assessment, previous records, tasks and frequencies.
- Site contacts receive a short form to confirm access details and contacts, so information arrives structured rather than in emails.
- Documents from the client or the outgoing contractor are uploaded and matched to sites, with AI assistance for reading site names from file names and document contents, and a person confirming each match.
- A dashboard shows readiness per site: complete, missing items, or blocked, with who owns each gap.
- Only sites marked ready are released into scheduling. Sites that are not ready get a survey visit booked to gather what is missing.
| Checklist item | Usual source | Collected by |
|---|---|---|
| Site contacts | Client | Site contact form |
| Access and keys | Site | Site contact form |
| Asset list | Outgoing contractor or survey | Import or engineer survey |
| Risk assessment | Client | Document upload and match |
| Tasks and frequencies | Contract scope | Operations |
A contract start the client notices for the right reasons
Your operations manager can tell the client exactly where onboarding stands, site by site, and what is needed from them. First visits go to sites that are ready, with engineers who know how to get in. Sites that were not ready get a planned survey visit rather than a failed monitoring visit.
Consider a school trust contract with a long list of schools. The site list comes in with inconsistent names. It is cleaned and matched to the trust's own references. Each school's business manager gets a short form for keyholders and access times, which also asks about holiday closure dates. Risk assessments are matched from a zip of PDFs, and the handful that could not be matched go to a person. The dashboard shows most schools ready, several waiting on asset lists, and a couple with no risk assessment at all, which becomes an early, useful conversation with the trust.
Because each onboarded site ends up with complete data in the same structure as your existing clients, it slots straight into your normal scheduling, reporting and invoicing.
Will your next contract start like this?
- Contract handovers arrive as spreadsheets in different formats.
- First visits have failed for lack of access information.
- Nobody can say which new sites are ready and which are not.
- Documents from the outgoing contractor are hard to match to sites.
- Onboarding pulls senior staff away from existing clients.