Floor care and cleaning
The floors want doing. Pick the trade and publish.
An office manager looks at the lobby on a Tuesday and decides the hard floors have had it. That job goes out as Porter, janitorial & floor care — the trade that covers the nightly walk, the restrooms, the trash and the floors themselves. Pick it from the list, write the scope in your own words, and companies cleared for that work read it.
What you say, and what you pick
The trade decides who reads it
- The hard floors want stripping and doing againPorter, janitorial & floor care
- Restrooms, glass and trash, six nights a weekPorter, janitorial & floor care
- The whole exterior before the season startsPainting
- The hood over the kitchen line, on the inspector’s scheduleRecorded under the address, not put out for proposals
Say it the way you would say it to somebody standing in front of you. The one thing to be exact about is the trade, because that is what puts the request in front of the right companies.
One trade, several names
Janitorial, porter, floor care: one line on the list, and it is the same companies.
Whoever strips and refinishes your hard floors is almost always whoever does the restrooms and the glass, because the same crew is in the building after hours anyway. The trade list keeps them together for that reason.
Pick the trade, then write like a person.
“Nightly after close, restrooms and the lobby, hard floors done each quarter” is a scope. Nobody needs it in a house format, and every company answering prices from the same words you typed.
What falls outside the list is still on the record.
The kitchen hood, the locksmith at two in the morning, the sign company: that work is recorded, documented and paid for under the address alongside the contracts you put out for proposals. It is not something you can publish a request for, and the list above says so on its last row.
The one that matters here
This is the trade that puts a stranger in your building at night.
Painters work outside in daylight. A cleaning crew has a key, an alarm code and the run of the place after everyone has gone home, and the rulebook treats it accordingly.
A background check is part of answering, not part of onboarding.
A cleaning company files it with the date it was run and the date it runs out, the same way it files a certificate, and a person reads it. Until that is done the company cannot send you a price at all.
This one gets no renewal window.
An insurance policy that lapses has a stated period to come back before the company is blocked. A background check that runs out has none: the block lands the same day, which is the right answer for the document that is about who is holding your keys.
The check runs twice.
Once when a company answers your request, and again when you send that company to a site. A file that was current in March and lapsed in June does not quietly stay green. The whole rulebook, document by document.
Porter, janitorial & floor care
What it puts on record
- Background checkDecides who may propose
- General liabilityDecides who may propose
- W-9Collected and verified
- Workers’ compensationDecides who may propose
What you need
An address, a scope, and the figures you require.
Nothing is drawn on a map for this work and nothing is measured before it goes out. The floor plan is worth attaching if you have one, and it is an attachment rather than a condition.
Before this request can publish
The rule, asked for this trade
- Porter, janitorial & floor careThe address is enough
A floor plan helps a company price faster and it is never the thing standing between you and publishing.
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.
Crime and dishonesty is the line this trade is really about.
It covers theft by somebody with access, which is exactly the risk you take on when you hand over keys, fobs and gate codes. Set it the way your own insurer talks about it, mark it required, and a company under it cannot 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
Set them once per trade. A cleaning contract and a painting contract are different risks and the platform lets you say so rather than making you pick one number for both.
One document
It reaches cleaning companies, and it carries no phone number.
Publishing a cleaning request is the moment most people brace for the calls. This one goes out with the site, the scope and your figures on it, and with nothing on it that lets a company route around the document.
Issued through VendoRFP. Vendors send their proposals back on this site. No phone number or email address is published with this RFP.
The answers arrive in one shape.
Each one prices every line you asked for and says how often the company would attend, so what you are comparing is the work rather than the layout somebody chose for their estimate.
The insurance is read before the price is sent.
Falling under a required figure stops a proposal before it is sent, and the company is told what it is short of so it can go and fix it. A preferred figure works the other way round: the company comes through and the gap is named for you.
Afterwards
Every night’s work lands under the address it was done at.
Cleaning is the contract nobody can prove happened, which is why the visit record matters more here than in any other trade you buy. It is filed as the work is done, with the photographs taken on the way out.
Somebody asks whether the floors were actually done in March.
March is on the schedule, and each visit carries what was filed when it finished. The answer is a screen rather than a phone call to a supervisor who was not there.
Your bookkeeper asks for the period.
Run the export over whatever range you want and hand over the file their software imports. The invoice carries the cleaning company’s own line items at their own figures.
The next location starts from what you already built.
Add the address, publish the same scope, and the company you liked is already read. Nothing about the paperwork happens a second time.
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
Nightly work adds up to a lot of small invoices. The export turns a quarter of them into one file your bookkeeper opens once.