LineReady / Guides / Cleaning checklist
Restaurant cleaning checklist: daily, weekly, and monthly
A restaurant cleaning checklist only works if it's split by frequency: what happens during every shift, what happens every day, and what happens on a weekly or monthly cycle. Stores that keep one giant list end up doing the easy half of it daily and the deep-clean half never, because "clean the restaurant" is not a task, it's a mood.
During every shift
Continuous: never fully "done"
- Sanitizer buckets refreshed on schedule and tested with strips
- Wipe tables and high-touch surfaces as guests turn
- Spot-sweep floors; spills mopped immediately with a wet-floor sign
- Restroom checks on a set interval, with a time and a name, not "when someone notices"
- Trash pulled before it crowns, lids and rims wiped
Daily: split between mid-shift and close
Every day, owned by a named person
- A mid-shift sanitation pass: stations reset, contact surfaces sanitized, floors behind the line
- All food-contact surfaces cleaned and sanitized at close
- Floors swept, mopped, and corners reached, FOH and BOH
- Fryer filtering per your schedule; equipment exteriors wiped
- Dish area broken down, sinks emptied and sanitized
- Restrooms full clean and restock
Weekly and monthly: the cycle that prevents surprises
On a rotation, written down
- Weekly: walk-in floors and shelving, ice machine exterior, hood filters through the dish machine, wall behind the line, drains treated
- Weekly: dining room details: chair legs, booth seams, window sills, menu boards
- Monthly: behind and under equipment moved on casters, ceiling tiles and vents, dry storage deep-organize
- Per your service contracts: hood deep clean, grease trap service, pest control walk
The weekly and monthly cycle is exactly what inspectors and secret shoppers catch stores on, because it's invisible day to day. Put every rotating task on a specific weekday and it stops depending on someone's memory.
Assign names, not shifts
"PM crew cleans the lobby" fails on the first busy night, because everyone on PM crew believes someone else owns it. Every line on a cleaning list should resolve to one person for that day, which is also the only version of the list you can coach from afterward.
Running cleaning lists in LineReady
LineReady turns each frequency into its own checklist (mid-shift sanitation, closing clean, weekly rotation), generated on schedule and completed with a name and time per task.
- Separate lists per frequency, each with a due-by time
- Assign a list to a person from the shift lineup
- Every checked box records who and when
- Yesterday's list is always on record when something looks off