How a request works
Follow one request from the address to the record.
A restaurant group has a location where the back of house never quite gets clean, and a manager who has been meaning to change the cleaning company since spring. That is where this walkthrough starts, and by the end of it the same scope is running at the rest of the group.
A request, start to finish
One address, one document
Nothing in this sequence charges you, and nothing in it is counted per location.
Step one
Type the address. Describe the work. Name the trade.
Our manager types the street address of the location that has been bothering her, writes down what she wants done and when, and picks the trade from the list. Naming the trade is what decides which companies are shown the request, so it is the field worth being exact about.
She is not asked to draw anything.
Only work priced off the ground itself needs the ground traced before a price can exist, and the list beside this paragraph asks that rule once for every trade. Her scope is not one of those, so the address she typed is the whole of what the request needs.
Plain words are the format.
“Every night after close, kitchen floors and the walk-in, glass on Fridays” is a scope. If her operations team already wrote a specification, she attaches it and publishes that instead, and every answer prices from the same sheet.
She sets what a company has to carry.
The figures go in per trade, each marked required or preferred, and they print inside the request itself. A company reads what it has to clear before it decides whether answering is worth its afternoon.
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
Only work priced off the ground itself needs the ground drawn first. Everything else goes out from the address you typed, on the day you write it.
The part that only matters here
A request is written for one address, and you hold as many addresses as you run.
This is the question a manager at a second location actually arrived with, so it gets its own chapter rather than a line in a footnote. The answer has two halves, and the second one is the reason the first is not a limitation.
Where each thing lives
Several addresses, one login
Kept under the address
- The request and the contract it became
- The schedule for that address
- The visits, as they are filed
- The invoices and what has been paid
Carried by the company
- Its insurance certificates and their dates
- The credential its trade requires
- Its W-9
You move between addresses from a control at the top of the page, and what you are looking at is always one of them.
One address per request, because a price is for a building.
A cleaning company cannot put one number on a downtown location with a basement kitchen and a suburban one with a patio. Splitting them is not a restriction, it is what makes the answers comparable and the contracts enforceable.
The switch at the top of the page is the whole of the navigation.
Every location she opens brings its own schedule, its own answers, its own certificates and its own invoices. Nothing bleeds between them, and she never has to work out which building a document belongs to.
The company travels; the paperwork does not repeat.
A cleaning company read for the first location is read for the rest of the group. When she publishes at the second address, that company is already eligible to answer and is measured against whatever she asked for there.
Nothing here is counted per location, per login or per request.
Adding the rest of the group does not change what this side of the platform costs her, and neither does adding the people who have to sign off. Where the figures live.
Step two
It goes to companies cleared for that trade.
Her request reaches the companies already cleared for that trade. Cleared means the documents that work requires are on record and a person has read every one of them.
Issued through VendoRFP. Vendors send their proposals back on this site. No phone number or email address is published with this RFP.
She can bring her own.
The cleaning company that does her sister location is invited by name. It files what the trade requires like everybody else, and then it is answering alongside companies she had not heard of.
Her phone stays quiet.
Questions come back through the request, in writing, against the scope everybody else is reading. Publishing a job does not put her number on a follow-up list that outlives the contract.
Step three
Answers, in the order they were sent, in one layout.
Each proposal prices every line she asked for and says how often the company would attend. She reads them beside each other rather than opening attachments one at a time and building a spreadsheet nobody asked her to build. Proposals can land in as little as 6 hours.
The insurance was checked before the price arrived.
A company that falls under a figure she made required is turned back when it tries to send her a proposal, and told what it is short of. She never sees the round trip, and nothing she is comparing is from a company she could not hire.
The order is the arrival order, and that is all it is.
What she weighs is the price, the frequency and the insurance behind each company. The judgment is hers to make on those, and whichever one she signs is the one she chose.
She awards it, and the agreement is hers.
The contract is between the restaurant group and that cleaning company, at the figure the two of them agreed. What the group pays is what the company quoted.
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
She opens one screen rather than seven attachments, and the layout is the same on every answer she reads.
Step four
From the first night, everything files itself under that address.
The request, the proposal that won, the contract, the schedule, each visit as it is finished, the certificates and the invoices all sit in the file for the location they belong to. A season in, the story of that address is one screen.
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
The location she asked about, over whatever period head office wants.
Head office asks what one location spent on cleaning.
Run the export across the period and hand over the file their software imports. The invoices carry each company’s own line items at their own figures, with sales tax and payment processing broken out rather than folded together.
Then she does it again, at the next address.
Same scope, new location, and a shortlist that already knows her standards. Each one after the first takes less of her afternoon, because the paperwork behind the companies is already done.