Your project team can receive credit for an audit that doesn’t exactly follow APPA procedures, but you'll need to demonstrate that the audit was already in place prior to commencing work on your LEED application. Past LEED practice, supported by CIRs, has

Your project team can receive credit for a non-APPA audit that doesn't follow the exact APPA procedures, but you'll need to demonstrate that the audit was already in place prior to commencing work on your LEED application. Additionally, you must “demonstrate equivalence or superiority to the APPA procedures" in regards to the following key areas in the LEED application materials:

• a) Area of spaces included in the audit (i.e., must be at least 10% of total area cleaned)
• b) Diversity of spaces included in the audit (i.e., must include some level of auditing for each type of regularly occupied space in the project building)
• c) Items assessed (e.g., floors, horizontal surfaces, vertical surfaces, etc.)
• d) Definition of clean (i.e., for dichotomous rating system that use a pass/fail methodology, pass must at least be equivalent to APPA’s definition of “Casual Inattention”)