Custodial and grounds
Inside the buildings it is custodial. Outside them it is grounds. A district runs both across its campuses, a city runs both at city hall and the branches, and a park district runs both at every shelter and every field. Different crews, different seasons, and the same first question either way: what does the company have on record before it is allowed to answer you?
VendoRFP holds that answer per trade, reads each document a person filed, and keeps the date it runs to. You write the scope of work. Companies that are already clear send back prices.
Custodial
Night custodial, day porter work, the summer deep clean, the crew that resets a cafeteria between an assembly and a rental. It is one trade in the rulebook, and it is the one where the person doing the work is inside the building after everyone else has gone home.
So the rulebook asks for something here it asks of only one other trade. A company cannot answer a custodial request of yours without a background check on file, and that document gets no renewal window: an expired check is not a check, so it has to be current on the day the company answers. The completed check, with the date it was run and the date it runs out.
Read that as exactly what it says. It is a document a reviewer read and a date that is either current or is not. It is not clearance for a person to be on your campus, and whatever your state makes you run before somebody walks a hallway with children in it is your process and stays your process.
On the gate for custodial work
Background check, general liability and workers’ compensation, each read by a person before a price can reach you.
The two insurance lines carry a 30-day renewal window, because a policy in renewal is a policy. The check carries none. Both facts come off the same table, and neither is a setting anybody can loosen for one company.
Grounds and athletic fields
Mowing and edging, the beds, the trees, the fields the games are played on, and the stretch of frontage that is the first thing anybody sees. Grounds is the department whose work is visible from the road, and the one whose equipment arrives on a trailer behind a truck.
Grounds work is the one trade whose ability to answer a request rests on auto liability as well as general liability and workers’ compensation. The certificate covering the vehicles the crew arrives in, with the date the policy runs out. A district reading that line is reading about the truck and the trailer that come through the gate in the morning, which is why the rulebook asks for it here and nowhere else.
Mowing, edging, the beds along the front walk, the turf on the game fields and the strips nobody can name until somebody complains about them are one scope of work to one company. You write the scope; the answers price the same one.
Growing season, the shoulder weeks, the summer stretch when the mowers run and nobody is in the building: how often a crew attends is part of what you ask for and part of what each answer prices. Nothing on our side decides your season for you.
No state issues a license for grounds work as a trade, so the rulebook asks for none and this page does not invent one. What it asks for beyond the two insurance lines every company files is the vehicle certificate above. Weed and pest treatment is a separate trade with a state license of its own, put out as its own request.
Drawing the ground
Before a grounds request goes out, you mark the ground it covers on a satellite view of the site: the mowed acreage, the fields, the beds, the strips along the fence line. It takes a few minutes and it is the step that makes the answers comparable.
The reason is not paperwork. Grounds work is priced off area, so a company that guesses the acreage is pricing a different job from the company beside it. When the ground is drawn once and printed into the request, every answer you get back prices the same acres, and the difference between two of them is the difference between two companies rather than two guesses.
Custodial work does not ask for it. Neither does anything else you can put out here: an address publishes the request, and you can still draw the site if you want the record.
Why the answers compare
One drawn boundary, printed into the request, priced by everybody who answers it.
A walk-through still helps and nothing here replaces one. What the drawn ground removes is the argument afterwards about which acres the price covered.
The request
The site, the trade, the scope of work in your own words or in the specification your business office already wrote, and the date you want answers by. Your insurance figures print inside the same document, so a company reads what it has to carry before it decides whether to answer at all.
It reaches companies verified in that trade. Not an advertisement, not a listing anyone can walk into: a document sent to the companies whose paperwork a person has already read.
A company you already work with is not shut out by that — you can bring them in yourself, and they file the same paperwork every other company files before they can answer you.
What comes back is priced against the lines you asked for, in the order the answers arrive, with that company’s insurance and credentials beside it — measured against the figures you set, not a badge and not a summary somebody wrote.
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.
Nobody gets your desk line out of a request of yours, and nobody has to be given one to send you a price.
The record
The certificate of insurance you were shown, with the date it runs to. The visits the crew logged, with their photographs. The work orders raised against that site. The invoices, each carrying a purchase order field your business office can insist on. The answer to what was spent at the middle school last year is a page you open, not an afternoon somebody loses.
A COI that lapses in November stops being a current document on the day it lapses rather than the day somebody notices, and the state of every company working your sites sits on one page. What a lapse does and how long the window runs is on insurance and credentials.
Custodial and grounds are two departments, two seasons and two crews, and they arrive at the same question: is this company clear to work here today? Everything else on this leg answers the parts around it.