Proposal gate
Insurance and the trade’s own credential
Missing one of these and the company cannot send you an answer at all. It is checked when they ask to answer and checked again on the day you send them to a property.
Vendor packets
The file you chase every year, kept where the work is.
A packet is a certificate, a workers’ comp declaration, a W-9, whatever card the trade requires, and a renewal date that arrives long after anybody last opened the folder. Most firms keep that in a shared drive and find out it expired when somebody needs the company on site. Here it is the same file the proposal gate reads, so a lapse stops the work before it surprises you.
What every company files
Whatever trade it holds
- General liabilityRead by a person
- Workers’ compensationRead by a person
- Business registrationKept, gates nothing
Plus a W-9, collected and verified for the tax record, and the credential its own trade requires before it may propose.
Every line, and the number is yours
You set the limits. We check the certificate against them.
Every line below can be set per trade, made mandatory or left preferred, or switched off entirely if you never ask for it. The figure column on this page is blank because the figure is yours — printing an example would read as advice, and we have none to give.
| Coverage | Your minimum | Why a manager asks for it |
|---|---|---|
| General liability (per occurrence) | One incident at one property — someone hurt by a crew on site, or damage to a building. | |
| General liability (aggregate) | Everything that company’s policy will answer for across the whole policy year. | |
| Workers' comp / employer's liability | Their crew, injured on your property. Without it, the bill for that injury has nowhere else to go. | |
| Auto liability | The truck and the trailer in your drive. Asked of grounds work and of no other trade. | |
| Umbrella / excess | The layer above the others, for the incident that runs past a primary limit. | |
| Professional liability | Advice and design rather than labour — a specification that turns out to be wrong. | |
| Pollution liability | What a chemical, a fuel spill or a treatment leaves behind. | |
| Crime / employee dishonesty | Theft by somebody who was there because you let them in. |
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.
The rulebook
The same insurance in every trade, and at most one more that the trade itself requires.
This is the whole table, not a summary of it. Read down the middle column: general liability and workers’ compensation are in every row, which is why a company that files them once can answer requests from every manager on the platform instead of assembling a packet per firm.
| Trade | Before it may propose | Also collected |
|---|---|---|
| Pool cleaning | General liability · CPO certification · Workers’ compensation | W-9 |
| Landscaping and grounds | Auto liability · General liability · Workers’ compensation | W-9 |
| Cleaning and day porter | Background check · General liability · Workers’ compensation | W-9 |
| Gate and on-site attendants | Background check · General liability · Workers’ compensation (+ Lifeguard certification, on the lifeguard scope) | W-9 |
| Pest control | General liability · Pest control license · Workers’ compensation | W-9 |
| HVAC | General liability · EPA 608 certification · Workers’ compensation | W-9 |
| Electrical | General liability · Electrical contractor license · Workers’ compensation | W-9 |
| Painting | General liability · Workers’ compensation | W-9 |
Painting is the short row and it is short honestly: most states license a painting contractor under a general contractor’s licence or do not license one at all, so there is no card to require. An invented requirement would have made the table look tidier and the platform less true.
| Document | What it has to show |
|---|---|
| Auto liability | The certificate covering the vehicles the crew arrives in, with the date the policy runs out. |
| General liability | The certificate, with the coverage limits your own minimums are checked against and the date the policy runs out. |
| W-9 | A signed W-9 carrying the company’s legal name and taxpayer number. |
| Workers’ compensation | The certificate covering the company’s own crew, with the date the policy runs out. |
| CPO certification | The card carries the date it expires. |
| Background check | The completed check, with the date it was run and the date it runs out. |
| Lifeguard certification | The certification carries the date it expires. |
| Pest control license | The state license to treat a building for termites, rodents and wood-destroying organisms, with the date it expires. |
| EPA 608 certification | The federal certification required to handle refrigerants under EPA Section 608. It carries no expiration date. |
| Electrical contractor license | The state license to perform electrical work as a company, with the date it expires. |
They are not the same gate
One gate decides who may answer you. Everything else is kept, and says so.
Firms that run this on a spreadsheet usually collapse the three, and the cost is a taxpayer number demanded from a company that only wanted to quote you.
Collected for the tax record
W-9
Read and verified against the company’s legal name and taxpayer number, and it is no part of what a company clears to answer you. Nobody needs a taxpayer number from a company to read what it would charge.
Collected, not a gate
Business registration
Read and kept on file. It gates nothing today, and saying so is more useful to you than implying a check that is not running.
The date nobody writes down
A policy that lapses has a stated window. A credential has none at all.
The rule, as it is enforced
This is the rule itself, word for word
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.
This is the same sentence that runs when a policy lapses, not a friendlier summary of it — so what you read here is what actually happens.
Why insurance gets 30 days and a card gets none
Renewal paperwork genuinely lags the renewal, and a company whose policy renewed last week may not have the new certificate in hand. A certification is different: it either was current the day they answered you or it was not.
What it does to work already under way
Nothing. A crew standing on your property finishes what they came to do and files the record. What stops is new proposals and new work, which is the only place a pause is any use to you.
What a limit comes back as
Six answers, and one of them is the reason to bother with any of this.
A binder holds one state — the document is in it or it is not. A checked packet holds six, and the useful ones are the middle four.
Meets
A verified certificate carries at least the figure you set. This is the only answer that lets a company through a mandatory line.
Short
They carry the coverage and it is below your figure. The shortfall is reported in dollars — to them, so they know what to raise it to.
Missing
You asked for a coverage and nothing on file answers it. Not a low number: no number.
Expired
The policy ran out. Cover that lapsed yesterday buys you nothing today, so it fails with its own reason rather than being quietly counted.
Unverified
A figure the company typed that nobody has read off a certificate yet. It is reported to you as their own claim, and it never produces “meets”.
Advisory gap
A line you marked preferred rather than mandatory, and they fall short of it. It is reported to you and it lets them through, because you said it could.
Unverified is the one worth reading twice. A number a company typed about itself is reported to you as exactly that, and it never comes back as met. Every packet you have ever chased was a pile of unverified numbers with a staple through it.