Exterior painting
A hotel, a store or an office building that needs painting, put out from the address with nothing measured first.
How a paint job goes outMulti-site facilities
Put the work out at every site you run, and nothing here is priced per site.
A hotel wants its exterior painted before the season. An office wants its floors done overnight. Every store in the chain wants the same porter contract, and each one is its own round of calls, its own certificate to chase and its own spreadsheet of who answered. Write the request here instead. Companies carrying the cover you require read it, and priced answers come back to that site’s own file.
What a request needs before it publishes
The rule, asked per trade
- Pool cleaningThe address is enough
- Landscaping & groundsA drawn boundary first
- Porter, janitorial & floor careThe address is enough
- Gate guards, pool and site attendantsThe address is enough
- Pest controlThe address is enough
- HVACThe address is enough
- ElectricalThe address is enough
- PaintingThe address is enough
Before anything else
Buying costs nothing, and nothing in it is counted per site.
You are not billed for a location, for a login, or for the request itself. There is no tier that unlocks a second site and no plan that has to be raised when a third one opens.
Your sites sit on one login.
Each address gets its own file, and you move between them from a control at the top of the page. What belongs to one site stays under that site: its schedule, its answers, its certificates, its invoices.
Everyone who has to sign off can be on it.
The person who writes the request, the one who has to approve the spend and the general manager who will live with the result can all be in the same account, reading the same answers, with nothing charged for the extra chairs.
What you spend is what you agreed with the company.
Their price is their price. Nothing of ours rides on top of it, and no percentage of the work is taken on the way through.
Putting work out and awarding it is a company-funded side of the market.
A company buys the volume of verified bidding it wants to do — how many of your kind of account can carry its certificate, and how much of its work goes out with a checked file behind it. That charge is sized by the company’s own bidding, never by how many sites ask it for a proposal. What that costs a company is answered where the vendor side of this is priced, not on the page above.
What each of these costs you
Every site, every person
- Publish a request at a siteNo charge
- Invite companies you already useNo charge
- Read the proposals side by sideNo charge
- Award the work and keep the signed contractNo charge
- Add another site to your accountNo charge
- Add the people who have to sign offNo charge
Nothing on this list is metered, and nothing on it is counted per site. The next address you add costs what the first one did.
One document
An address is enough to publish.
Name the site, say what you want done in plain words, and set a date for answers. If your operations team already wrote the specification, attach it and publish that instead. Either way, every company answering prices from the same sheet you keep.
Request for proposals
The document you publish
1The siteThe name and the address of the one location this request is for. One site per request, so each one comes back with its own priced answers.
2Scope of workWhat you want done and how often, in plain words — or the specification your operations team already wrote, attached and published as it stands.
3Services requestedThe trade this request covers, so only companies cleared for it can answer.
4Insurance requirementsThe limits you set, printed inside the request, so nobody prices work they cannot be awarded.
5SubmissionWhen answers are due and where they go. Priced proposals come back through your account.
6AttachmentsFloor plans, a fixture schedule, last season’s invoice, photographs of the ground in question — attached as files, printed as a list.
It prints and it downloads, so the copy in your own file and the copy a company prices from are the same sheet.
The floors want rewaxing. The lot needs striping.
Say it the way you would say it to somebody standing in front of you, then pick the trade it belongs to. Floor care and back-of-house cleaning go out as porter and janitorial work; the exterior goes out as painting. The trade is what decides which companies see the request, so it is the one thing you are asked to be exact about.
Nothing is drawn on a map first.
One trade is the exception, and only one: work priced from the ground itself needs the ground measured before anybody can price it. Everything else publishes from the address you typed. Ask for landscaping and the publish step holds you at a satellite view of that address so you can trace the boundary yourself, right there, before the request goes out — nobody else draws it and nothing is sent for pricing until you do. The list at the top of this page is that rule, asked once for each trade.
Your phone number stays off it.
The document goes out with the site, the scope and your limits on it, and with no way for a company to reach around it.
Issued through VendoRFP. Vendors send their proposals back on this site. No phone number or email address is published with this RFP.
Before anyone answers
You set the limits. A person reads the paperwork against them.
There are 8 coverages you can put a figure against, per trade, in the words the request prints them in. The limits you set print inside the request itself, so a company reads what it has to clear before it decides whether to answer.
The cover you require
Your figures, per trade
- General liability (per occurrence)
- General liability (aggregate)
- Workers' comp / employer's liability
- Auto liability
- Umbrella / excess
- Professional liability
- Pollution liability
- Crime / employee dishonesty
Each line is a figure you type, per trade, and mark required or preferred. Nothing carries a default, because the number is the one your own agreements already name.
The file belongs to the company, not to one site.
A company’s certificate is read once, by a person, and held with the date it runs to. It is then measured against whatever each of your sites asks for, so a painter whose cover clears the hotel already clears the restaurants that ask for the same, and is told in dollars exactly what it is short of where a site asks for more.
You already know where a packet fails.
Usually it is the endorsement — the separate certificate naming your company as additionally insured on the other side’s policy. It is never part of their base cover and has to be issued on its own, so if your broker asks what to request, that document is the one to name. That is why a person reads each certificate rather than a filename being counted: a policy can be on file and in date and still not carry that endorsement. What VendoRFP holds is the limit on each line and the date it runs to; which names an endorsement carries stays between you, the company and its agent.
The date is watched after that, and one credential is not.
A policy that lapses has 30 days to come back before the company is blocked: it cannot answer your requests and cannot be sent to a site until the certificate is current again. A trade license or certification works differently — if it lapses or is missing, the block is immediate, with no 30-day window to fix it first.
What comes back
Priced answers you can read beside each other.
Hotels, stores, restaurants and offices all buy the same trades. What stops working as the addresses add up is picking one answer out of a mailbox full of them, and then doing it again at the next location.
They arrive in the order they were sent
Each answer prices every line you asked for and says how often the company would attend. You read them beside each other on one screen rather than in six email threads with six different layouts.
Everyone answering has already cleared your figures
A company short of a limit you made mandatory is refused when it tries to send you an answer, and told the shortfall in dollars. A line you marked preferred is reported to you and lets them through.
You choose, and the contract is yours
You award it, and the agreement is between you and that company. Whoever you pick is already carrying the cover you require, because carrying it was the condition of answering at all.
After you sign
Everything about a site stays under that site.
The schedule, the visits, the photographs, the certificates and the invoices land in one file per location from the day the contract starts.
Head office asks what happened in March.
March is on the schedule, and each visit carries the record the crew filed when it finished: what was done, when, and the photographs taken on the way out.
Your bookkeeper asks for the month.
Run the export over the period you choose and hand over the file their software imports. The invoice carries the company’s own line items at its own figures, with sales tax and payment processing on lines of their own.
Leaving takes the record with you.
The exports are the same ones you have been running all along, so there is no last step to perform and nothing that only exists here.
One site’s file
A season in
- The scheduleEvery visit, dated
- The visit recordFiled as it is done
- The certificateWith its expiration date
- The invoiceThe company’s own lines
- The contract and the request it answeredBoth kept
Exports as Detailed CSV, General journal CSV (double-entry), QuickBooks Online CSV, QuickBooks Desktop IIF, Xero CSV — whichever your accountant asked for.
The trades
What you can put out for proposals today.
A company holds one of these before it can answer a request for it, and each one asks for its own credential on top of the insurance — a pest control company shows the license the state issues it, a staffing company shows its background checks.
- Pool cleaning
- Landscaping & grounds
- Porter, janitorial & floor care
- Gate guards, pool and site attendants
- Pest control
- HVAC
- Electrical
- Painting
Floor care and cleaning
Hard floors, restrooms and the nightly walk — and the one trade whose companies are checked for who they send inside.
What the cleaning trade filesThe vendor file
What every trade puts on record, what a person checks it against, and what happens on the day a policy lapses.
See the whole rulebookHow a request works
One request followed end to end, and what changes when you run several locations rather than one.
Walk one throughA locksmith at two in the morning, a sign contractor, a kitchen hood cleaner on a schedule the health inspector set: work outside that list is recorded, documented and paid for here under the site it belongs to, alongside the contracts that were put out for proposals.
Publishing a request, reading what comes back and awarding it are free for every site on your account. One thing is bought rather than given, and it is optional: Roster Watch re-checks the companies on your roster on its own schedule, so a policy that lapses reaches you before the next time somebody opens the folder.
Run a service company rather than a set of locations? Get verified once, then choose which published requests to answer, whichever industry put them out.