Exterior painting
The paint is going. Put the job out today.
A hotel owner walks the north elevation in March and knows what the summer is going to do to it. What follows is usually a week of phone calls, companies who never come back, and a certificate somebody promises to email. Write the job down here instead. Painting companies carrying the insurance you require read it, and their prices come back to that building’s own file.
Painting
What it puts on record
- General liabilityDecides who may propose
- W-9Collected and verified
- Workers’ compensationDecides who may propose
Before anyone answers
General liability, workers’ compensation, and no license behind them.
Every company that wants to answer a painting request files general liability and workers’ compensation, each with the date the policy runs to, and a person reads both. A W-9 is collected and read the same way, and it is the tax form your accounts team will want on record rather than one of the documents that decides who may propose.
There is no third document to ask for.
Pool work has its CPO card. Pest control and electrical work each have a state license, and a company without a current one is stopped the day it lapses. There is no single state-issued painting license the way there is a pest control or an electrical one — most states license a painting contractor under a general contractor’s license, or not at all, so the rulebook asks for no third document here, which is why the list at the top of this page ends where it does rather than being padded to match its neighbors.
What you can still insist on is the insurance.
This is where a painting buyer actually gets leverage. A ladder against a guest room window, a sprayer over a parking lot, somebody’s car under the overspray: the figures on the certificate are what stand between you and that, and they are yours to set rather than ours to suggest.
Somebody reads the paperwork, and it is a person.
A file that has been uploaded but not read counts for nothing. What gets checked, and when lays out the whole rulebook if you want to see it before you write anything.
Before this request can publish
The rule, asked for this trade
- PaintingThe address is enough
Grounds work is priced off the land, so it is the one trade held at a satellite view. A building is at the address you typed.
What you need
Nothing has to be drawn, walked or measured before the job goes out.
Type the address, describe the elevations you want done, and set the date you want answers by. The measuring is the painting company’s job and always was; they do it to price their own work, and each one does it their own way.
You are not asked for a specification you do not have.
If your operations team already wrote one, attach it and publish that. If nobody did, “the street-facing elevations and the porte-cochère, before the season” is a scope, and every company answering prices from the same words.
The one trade this is different for is not this one.
Grounds work is priced off the land itself, so a landscaping request holds you at a satellite view of the address until you have traced the boundary. Painting is priced off the building, and the building is at the address you typed.
Your figures
You name the numbers. They print inside the request.
Most owners already know these, because a lender or an insurer wrote them into something years ago. Put them in once, mark each line required or preferred, and a company reads what it has to clear before it decides whether to answer at all.
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
A painting request is where the umbrella line earns its place: it sits above the others when a claim runs past them, and a hotel owner is usually the one who has been told to ask for it.
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.
A short company is turned around before it costs you a phone call.
When a painter tries to answer a request whose mandatory figures it does not clear, it is refused and told the shortfall in dollars. It can raise the line and come back. You never see the round trip.
Preferred is a real setting, not a softer required.
Mark a line preferred and a company short of it still reaches you, with the gap named. That is the right setting for the line you would like and would not lose a good painter over.
One document
It goes out to painting companies, and not to a phone line.
The request carries the building, the scope, the limits and the date. It goes to companies cleared for painting, which is the list a person has already read the certificates for.
Issued through VendoRFP. Vendors send their proposals back on this site. No phone number or email address is published with this RFP.
Your front desk does not become a switchboard.
Anybody who wants to ask you something asks it through the request, in writing, against the scope everyone else is reading. Nothing about publishing a job puts your number into a company’s follow-up list forever.
The answers
Prices you can hold beside each other.
Every painter writes an estimate their own way, with their own idea of what counts as a line item, and reconciling them is the part of this that eats an afternoon. Here every answer is written against the scope you published, in one shape. Proposals can land in as little as 6 hours.
The certificate was read before the price arrived.
Whoever is in front of you cleared the figures you made required before their proposal was allowed to reach you. So what you are weighing up is a set of companies you could sign with this afternoon.
You pick, and the agreement is yours.
Award it and the contract is between your business and that painting company, at the figure the two of you agreed. What you pay them is what they quoted you.
You are reading the answers themselves.
Proposals appear in the order they arrived, each carrying the price, the frequency and the insurance behind it. Those are the three things a person deciding actually uses, and they are what is in front of you.
One proposal
What comes back, per company
- Every line you asked for, priced
- How often the company would attend
- What it holds, read against your limits
Every painter answers against the elevations you described, so the difference between two prices is a difference in the work rather than in the paperwork.
Afterwards
The job stays under the building it was done to.
The request, the proposal that won it, the contract, the photographs filed on the way out and the invoices all sit in one file for that address. When somebody at head office asks what was spent on the exterior last year, the answer is one export away.
What the record leaves as
Pick the one your accountant asked for
- Detailed CSV.csv
- General journal CSV (double-entry).csv
- QuickBooks Online CSV.csv
- QuickBooks Desktop IIF.iif
- Xero CSV.csv
Run the year, or the month the scaffolding was up. The file is the one your accountant's software imports without anybody retyping a line.
The invoice carries the painter’s own lines.
Their figures, their line items, with sales tax and payment processing broken out rather than folded into one number your bookkeeper has to unpick.
The next building starts from the same place.
Add the second address and publish the same scope against it. The painter you liked is already read, so nothing about the paperwork happens twice.