Checkout cleaning: the process from confirmation to review

Content

Checkout cleaning is the one piece of work in a hotel that can be neither postponed nor lost: whether the next guest can be let into the room depends on it. And it is usually run in three places at once — a spreadsheet, a group chat, and the administrator’s memory.

Below is how the process is arranged in ATQAR: where it starts, where it ends, and why there is no ‘done’ switch anywhere in it.

Cleaning starts from a fact, not from a plan

A cleaning task is not created from a departure date. The calendar says the guest was due to leave; the cleaning appears once a person has confirmed that they did. Those are two different events, and the difference costs a cleaning a day: the guest stays until the evening, and the housekeeper has already been and gone.

A confirmed departure raises exactly one cleaning. Not two if the departure was confirmed twice, and not none if the stay was closed after the fact.

If the stay is a long one, the cleanings during it run to their own rhythm — the interval is set for the property or for that particular stay. Missed intervals do not become a stack of overdue tasks: one missed cleaning appears instead.

A cleaning has a person and an hour, not a queue

There is no shared list that people take work from. Every cleaning has a named assignee and an exact hour inside that person’s shift.

The hour is chosen by the planner — and the planner always answers, even when there is nothing to answer with. There are three answers:

3 Aug 2026, 14:30–15:30
Check the duty roster: no eligible housekeeper is on duty for this cleaning.
The exact cleaning time is not planned yet because the date is still too far away.

Three answers from the planner: an exact hour, ‘no duty’, and ‘beyond the horizon’. The field is never left empty and never filled with a guess.

‘No duty’ is not a failure but a message: nobody is scheduled at the property that day, and the roster has to change first. A cleaning cannot be placed in an hour no shift covers — not by hand and not automatically. The order of choice is the same for everyone, and that is what makes the schedule predictable for an employee: work does not appear on a day they are not there.

Naming a person and an hour by hand is allowed. Stepping outside the shift is not.

Four states, and each one shows whose turn it is

Ready to do
In progress
Under review
Completed

One task in four states. What changes is the state, and whose turn it is.

The employee sees ‘Ready to do’, starts the work, attaches a photo or a video if there is something to show, and marks it done. The task then goes for review — and the turn passes to the administrator.

What matters is what happens to the name: it stays on the card. The work is still theirs; the decision no longer is.

Whoever did it does not accept it

That is a rule rather than a setting. Cleaning and repair are accepted by somebody else, and it cannot be switched off. The exception is one and very narrow: when no other eligible reviewer exists in the organisation at the moment of acceptance — a single administrator, say — the executor may accept their own result, and the system records that fact in the history as an immutable mark.

Review does not mean walking the floors: the administrator looks at what was attached, or records that they inspected the room themselves. If it will not do, they return it with a specific reason. Not ‘do it again’ but ‘dust on the windowsill’ — the reason goes into the task and stays in its history.

The rule has an honest boundary. Inspection, replenishment, and general work keep the older arrangement: an eligible owner or administrator may confirm their own result. The strict separation applies where the room’s readiness depends on the outcome — to cleaning and to repair.

Work done outside the system — by a contractor with no account, or by the administrator on a Sunday — is closed separately, by naming who did it, what came of it and when. Whoever closes it cannot be named as the performer of a cleaning or a repair. The room’s history does not lose the fact that somebody else did the work.

Readiness is a consequence, not a mark

Once the cleaning is accepted and no unresolved work is holding the room, the room becomes ready. Nobody switches it by hand: not the employee, not the administrator, not the owner.

So a broken tap reported during the cleaning keeps the room from becoming ready even after the cleaning is accepted. Work that holds a room is cleared by a decision with a reason, not by deleting the task.

More: Checkouts and cleaning, Review and rework, Room states.