Summer work
Strip and wax. Deep clean. The paint that cannot be done with children in the hallway. The rooftop work that needs a shutdown. Every district and every college runs the same calendar, and the weeks are not negotiable: from the last bell to the first day back, and a shorter version of the same thing at winter break.
What moves is when you ask. A scope written in February and sent to companies whose insurance is already read is a set of prices on a desk in March. The same scope written in May is a scramble, and the price shows it.
The package
Custodial, grounds, painting and the mechanical work are four trades and four sets of companies. Each one is its own request with its own scope and its own answers, which is what makes the prices readable side by side instead of hidden inside one number somebody quoted for the whole break.
A company answers for the trade it is verified in. Nobody sends you a price for floor work and roof work in the same envelope, so nobody has to be trusted on the half of it they do not do.
Work no company on the platform holds a trade for is a different matter, and it is worth being exact about it. A specialist boiler rebuild or a roof section is recorded here, documented here and paid for here under the site it belongs to, alongside the contracts that went out for proposals. It is not put out for proposals, because there is no verified trade behind it to send it to.
Why four requests beat one
Each trade prices its own scope, so you can award three and go back out on the fourth.
A package written as one lump has to be awarded as one lump. Split by trade, the half that came back well is settled in March and the half that did not gets a second pass while there is still time for one.
A date for answers
Every request carries a date you want answers by, typed by whoever publishes it, and printed in the document a company reads. It is your date and your standard, matched to whatever your own office needs in order to have the work settled before the last week of school.
Be clear about what that date is and is not. It is a line in a document, the same way it would be in a letter you sent yourself. Nothing here chases a company for you, counts down to it, or decides that an answer arriving after it is late. The reason to publish in February is that companies book their summers in February, not that anything on this side is running a clock.
The floor
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.
You enter those figures once, per trade, and mark each line required or preferred. A company carrying less than a figure you made required is stopped when it tries to answer, and it is told the shortfall in dollars, so it knows exactly what it has to raise rather than being told it did not qualify. A line you marked preferred is reported to you and lets the company through.
Nothing carries a default figure. The number a district asks for and the number a city asks for are not the same number, and inventing one on your behalf would be the most expensive kind of helpful.
Before a price, not after it
general liability and workers’ compensation are read by a person before the company can answer you at all.
So the prices on your desk in March are prices from companies that were already clear. There is no separate week in May where somebody discovers the one you liked cannot show a current certificate.
When one lapses
The end date comes off the certificate and is held with it, so the file knows when a policy runs out without anybody writing it down somewhere else. A renewal that is a few days late is a renewal, and the rule says so: an insurance line has a 30-day window to come back before it fails.
And the last clause of the rule is the one worth reading twice if you have ever had a crew halfway through a building in July.
The rule, as it runs
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.
What it stops is new work and new answers. What it never stops is the crew standing in the building today.
When the doors reopen
The summer ends, the buildings fill, and the questions start: what did we spend at each site, who did it, and can you show me the certificate of insurance they were working under. All three answers are already filed.
A crew logs the visit where it happened, with photographs attached to it. In September, what was done at each building over the break is a page rather than a folder somebody has to go and find.
What each company carried, what it was worth against your figures, and the date the policy runs to. The COI stays in the file after the work ends, which is the version an auditor asks for and the version nobody can reconstruct from memory in March.
An invoice arrives with its own number, its total and where it stands, filed under the site it bills for. It carries a purchase order field, and the company’s W-9 was collected and verified long before the first invoice was written.
Hand your business office a period
Pick a date range and download it. These files are written by the platform itself, so none of them waits on an account with anybody else.
Publishing a request, reading the answers, awarding one and keeping the record are free, at any number of campuses and sites. What is bought rather than given is on the pricing page, and it is one thing.
A summer package is the same request written four times, once per trade, early enough that the answers arrive while there is still a choice to make. The rest of this leg covers the trades themselves and the file that stands behind them.
Custodial and groundsInsurance and credentialsHow a request works