Janitorial and day porter

The largest line you sign, answered by companies whose paperwork was read first.

Nightly cleaning renews quietly. The contract rolls, the certificate in the folder ages, and the question of whether the company sweeping your floors after six is still insured gets answered in January by whoever opens the folder. VendoRFP holds the limits your service contract already states, reads each company’s certificate against them, and keeps the date every policy runs to.

You publish what you want done at one building. Priced answers come back from companies that cleared those limits before they were allowed to write one.

Create your accountCommercial real estate

What a janitorial company files

The rulebook for this trade, as the platform enforces it. Three of these decide whether a company may write you a proposal at all; the W-9 decides whether it can be paid.

  • Background checkBefore it can proposeNo window at all — it has to be current the day the company answers.
  • General liabilityBefore it can proposeA late certificate has 30 days to reach the file — but the coverage it certifies does not get the same window, and stops counting the day the policy runs out.
  • W-9Before it can be paidFiled once, and it is what lets money move.
  • Workers’ compensationBefore it can proposeA late certificate has 30 days to reach the file — but the coverage it certifies does not get the same window, and stops counting the day the policy runs out.

The work

Porter & janitorial, and where its edges are.

One trade covers the nightly clean and the person who walks the building through the day. Floors, restrooms and the offices a service contract names after hours; the lobby, the elevator cabs and the common areas of the building while people are in them; the loading dock and the trash room; the spill somebody calls down about at two in the afternoon.

Window washing, kitchen hood work and floor restoration sit outside the trades a company can be verified in here. That work is recorded, documented and paid for on the platform under the building it happened at, in the same file as the contracts that went out for proposals, so the building’s year reads as one record rather than two.

The check with no window

Two trades put a person in your building with nobody watching.

A cleaner works the floors after the last desk empties. An attendant sits at a lobby desk with a key to places the public never sees. Those two trades — Porter & janitorial and Lobby, gate and amenity attendants — are the ones whose proposal gate carries a background check, and they are the only two on the platform that do.

Background check

What the document has to show

The completed check, with the date it was run and the date it runs out.

Current on the day

A check that has run out is a check that has run out

Insurance gets a renewal window, because a policy in the post is still a policy. A background check gets none. The day it expires the company stops being able to answer a request for that trade, and it starts again the day a current one is filed.

Your limits

The numbers in your service contract are the numbers.

Nothing here carries a default, because the insurance article differs building to building and the one in front of you was negotiated by somebody who is still around to ask.

The coverage lines, and the column that is yours

These are the 8 lines you can set a figure against, in the words a published request prints them in. You type one against each line your exhibit names, per trade, and mark it required or preferred.

CoverageYour minimum
General liability (per occurrence)
General liability (aggregate)
Workers' comp / employer's liability
Auto liability
Umbrella / excess
Professional liability
Pollution liability
Crime / employee dishonesty

You set the coverage limits you require, often the number your own insurer or lender asks for. A vendor whose recorded coverage falls below one of them cannot propose on your work until it is raised.

How a certificate is verified

The request

One building, one document, one set of answers.

Give the address, name the trade, describe the work in the words you would use on the phone, and set a date for answers. The platform writes it up as a formal request with your minimums printed inside it and publishes it to companies verified for that trade.

Printed on the face of every request

Issued through VendoRFP. Vendors send their proposals back on this site. No phone number or email address is published with this RFP.

Every answer prices the lines you asked for and states how often the company would attend, so the sheets stack up beside each other and the differences are the ones you asked about.

After the award

The building keeps the year in one place.

Each visit is logged under the building it happened at, with the photographs taken on the night. The invoice arrives with its own number and where it stands. The certificate sits in the same file with the date it runs to, so next year’s renewal starts from a record rather than from a search.

Give your bookkeeper a period

Pick a date range and download it. These files are written by the platform itself, so none of them waits on an account with anybody else.

  • Detailed CSV.csv
  • General journal CSV (double-entry).csv
  • QuickBooks Online CSV.csv
  • QuickBooks Desktop IIF.iif
  • Xero CSV.csv

Janitorial and day porter

Put one building's cleaning out and read what comes back.

Create an account, enter the limits your service contract already states, and publish a request the same day. VendoRFP reads the certificate of whoever answers.

Create your accountHow verification works

Cleaning is the line a building team signs most often and looks at least, which is why the paperwork behind it is worth having read before the contract renews rather than after.

Start freeCommercial real estate

Industries we serve

Building engineeringThe insurance exhibitHow a request works