Municipal & education facilities
School districts, city and county facilities departments, park districts. Before a truck comes through a gate with children on the other side of it, you already know what the company driving it has to carry: the general liability figure, the workers’ comp, the auto liability. VendoRFP holds those figures as a standing requirement, reads each company’s certificate of insurance against them, and keeps the date every policy runs to. Then you put the work out and read what comes back.
The file on one company
Read by a person
A lapsed policy has 30 days to come back. Past that the company cannot answer a request of yours and cannot be scheduled onto a site until the certificate is current again. A trade credential gets no window at all: it has to be in force the day the company answers.
The paperwork is the paperwork your business office already asks for. What changes is where it lives — read once, held with the date it expires, and in front of you when you are lining up the summer rather than discovered when a crew is already on a site.
The file
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.
What the file shows is the certificate as it was filed: the carrier, the figure on each line, and the date the policy runs to. It is not a reading of an endorsement form, and nothing here asserts which names an additional insured endorsement carries — that stays between you, the company and its agent, the way it already does.
This table is insurance, and only insurance. If your own rules call for a financial guarantee on top of it — the kind a company posts before it starts larger trade work — that is set and held outside this table, the way it already is.
Coverage you can set a figure against
Your figures
| Coverage | Your minimum | Required or preferred |
|---|---|---|
| General liability (per occurrence) | ||
| General liability (aggregate) | ||
| Workers' comp / employer's liability | ||
| Auto liability | ||
| Umbrella / excess | ||
| Professional liability | ||
| Pollution liability | ||
| Crime / employee dishonesty |
You type a figure against each line your own requirement names, per trade, and mark it required or preferred. Nothing carries a default, because the figures differ district to district and city to city.
A company files its certificate of insurance and a reviewer reads it: the carrier, the figure on each line, the date it runs to. Until that has happened, the figure is what the company says it carries and it is reported to you as exactly that — never as a line that meets your requirement.
A company missing a line you marked required, or carrying less than your figure on it, is refused when it tries to send you a proposal, and told the shortfall in dollars so it knows what to raise. A line you marked preferred is reported to you and lets the company through.
The end date comes off the certificate and is held with it. Past that date the line fails rather than quietly passing, and the state of every file sits on one page you can open in June instead of finding it out in March.
VendoRFP verifies every vendor’s insurance and trade credentials, then tracks the expiration dates. An insurance policy that lapses has 30 days to be renewed; after that the vendor can’t propose on your work, and you can’t send them out or put them on the schedule until it is back in force. A certification gets no window at all: it has to be current the day a company proposes. A job already under way is what this never stops: a crew standing on your grounds finishes it and files the record.
The request
The site’s address, the trade, the scope of work in plain words or in the document you already wrote, and a date for answers. That is everything the form itself asks you to type. VendoRFP writes it up with your insurance figures printed inside it and sends it to companies verified for that trade.
An address is enough to publish. Only grounds work asks you to draw the ground first, because grounds work is the one that gets priced off it.
What that form does not replace: your own office’s process for running a solicitation. How widely you make it known, how you open what comes back, any guarantee you require a company to carry beyond its insurance, a walkthrough before anyone answers, an addenda process, or whoever has to sign off before you award — none of that runs inside this tool, and it is not built to. Run those steps the way your office already runs them, then use this for the request, the priced answers and the file afterward.
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.
Your figures print inside the same document as a table, so a company reads what it has to clear before it decides whether to answer. Nobody gets your direct line out of it, and nobody has to be given one to send you a price.
What comes back
Each proposal prices every line you asked for and states how often the company would attend. They are not two bids in two formats on two different sheets of paper: they answer the same request, so they read down the same columns. Beside each one is where its paperwork stood at the hour it was sent.
Whoever you pick was already carrying the cover you require, because carrying it was the condition of answering at all.
Who can see a proposal
A company that answers your request sees its own proposal and no other company’s.
No — never. Only the company that wrote a proposal, and the people on your own account, can ever see it. That is not a setting somebody could leave switched the wrong way: it is built into how a proposal gets looked up in the first place, not just what the screen decides to show, so there is no way in by guessing a link or an address.
After the award
Signing does not end the paperwork, it moves it. Everything that happens afterwards is filed under the site it happened at, so the answer to “what did we pay for at the middle school last year” is a page rather than an afternoon.
Every company working your sites, the documents each one had to file, what its cover is worth against your figures, and the date each policy runs out — on one page rather than in a drawer of PDFs.
Each visit is logged under the site it happened at, with the crew’s photographs attached to it, and a work order raised against a site stays with that site’s record rather than in somebody’s inbox.
An invoice arrives with its own number, its total and where it stands — sent, viewed, paid — filed under the site it bills for. It carries a purchase order field, and a company can set its own account to refuse to issue one without a PO number on it.
Hand your business office a period
Pick a date range and download it. These five files are written by the platform itself, so none of them waits on an account with anybody else.
The trades
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, and a company putting people on a campus with children on it shows its background checks.
Pool cleaning and aquatics staffing are two different requests, because they are two different companies. Pool cleaning is the water and the equipment; aquatics and site attendants is the people on deck, lifeguards included. A natatorium usually needs both, put out as two requests.
The two departments that buy the most outside work, and what a company already has to hold before it can answer for either one.
Read custodial and groundsGetting the June package out while it is still February, and what the file holds by the time the buildings reopen.
Read summer workEvery line you can set a figure against, every document held on a company, and what the file says the day a policy lapses.
Read insurance and credentialsOne package walked end to end at one district, from the day it goes out to the day the invoice is filed under the site.
Walk one requestA boiler that will not light in October, a roofer on one building, a striping crew for the bus loop: 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, awarding it and keeping the record afterwards are free, at any number of sites. One thing is bought rather than given: Roster Watch re-checks the companies on your roster every quarter, so a policy cancelled in the middle of its term reaches you the week it happens instead of the next time somebody opens the folder. What that costs is on the pricing page.
A district, a city and a park district buy the same three things: companies insured to the figures the agency itself sets, priced answers to a written scope of work, and a record afterwards that purchasing and an auditor can both read.