How a request works
Take the summer floor work. Strip and wax across a district's elementary campuses, done in the weeks the buildings are empty, written up in March so the prices are on a desk before spring break. Follow that one package down this page and you have seen everything this does.
A request here is a document, not a listing. You write it once, it goes out to companies whose paperwork a person has already read, and priced answers come back against the scope you wrote rather than against whatever each company felt like quoting.
The site and the scope
For the floor package that is each campus by address, the trade, and the scope in whatever form you already have it: the specification your business office keeps, or a paragraph you write in the box. Machine rooms and stage floors excluded, sealer coats named, the corridors listed by wing. Whatever you would have written into a solicitation goes in here unchanged.
Floor work publishes from the address alone. The one trade that asks you to draw the ground before you publish is grounds work, because grounds work is priced off area and every answer has to price the same acres. Custodial and grounds covers that step.
Who sees it
The request is not advertised and it is not a listing anybody can walk into. It goes to companies verified in the trade it names, which for the floor package is the companies that have filed a background check, general liability and workers’ compensation and had all three 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 each of them can see afterwards is the part worth being exact about. A company that answers sees its own answer and nobody else’s. That is not a screen deciding what to show: it is written into how an answer can be looked up at all, on the table itself, so there is no address to guess and no view that leaks one.
How you make the work known beyond that, whatever notice your own rules call for, and whoever has to sign before you award are your office’s steps. Run them the way you run them now.
Printed on the face of the request
Issued through VendoRFP. Vendors send their proposals back on this site. No phone number or email address is published with this RFP.
Which is the answer to the question every facilities director asks second: no, this does not put your desk line in front of a list of companies.
What comes back
Each answer prices the lines you asked for and says how often a crew would attend. They are not four sheets of paper in four formats: they answer the same document, so they read down the same columns and the difference between two of them is a difference you can point at.
Beside each one is that company’s insurance and credentials, measured against the figures you set — not a badge and not a summary somebody wrote: the certificate a person read, the credential behind the trade, and the dates both run to.
Whoever you pick was already carrying what you require, because carrying it was the condition of answering at all.
The purchase order
You award the floor package, your office cuts a purchase order against it, and every invoice that follows has to carry that number or the business office sends it back. That is how it works now and nothing here changes it. What changes is where the number lives.
An invoice on this platform carries its own number, its total, where it stands, and a purchase order field. A company can switch on a requirement in its own invoice settings that refuses to issue an invoice at all without a PO number on it, so the missing number is caught before the invoice exists rather than after it has been numbered, sent, rejected and voided. The company’s W-9 was collected and verified long before any of this, and it is not one of the documents that decides who may answer you.
And the invoice is filed under the site it bills for, which is what makes the question your business office actually asks answerable: what did this campus spend against this PO.
Where the number sits
On the invoice, in a field of its own, under the site the work happened at.
This does not raise your requisition, encumber your funds or talk to your financial system. It carries the number your office issued and files the invoice where the work was done.
The record
The request as it went out. The answers as they came in. Who was awarded and what they carried at the time. Every visit the crew logged with its photographs. The invoices, with their numbers. All of it filed under the campus it happened at, for as long as you keep the account.
Hand it over as a period
Choose the months you want and take the file. Each format below is produced here, so nothing about handing over a period depends on an account with a third party.
What the file holds about each company, and what it says the day a policy runs out, is on insurance and credentials.
That is the whole mechanism, and the parts of your own process it does not touch are named rather than glossed over. What surrounds it is on the other three pages under this leg.