--- title: "How to bid a commercial cleaning contract · BlastoClean" description: "Commercial bids are won on a spec sheet, not a walkthrough price: a frequency on every task, visits per week, and a monthly number a facilities manager can defend to their boss." url: "https://www.blastoclean.com/blog/how-to-bid-a-commercial-cleaning-contract" --- # How to bid a commercial cleaning contract August 13, 2026 · 5 min read · The BlastoClean Team The first commercial bid is where a lot of good residential companies get hurt. They walk the office suite the way they'd walk a four-bedroom house, add up the rooms, quote a per-visit price — and then discover that the building manager wanted trash pulled nightly, carpets vacuumed weekly, high dusting done monthly, and the floors stripped and waxed once a quarter. None of those fit in a per-visit price, because **there is no such thing as "a visit"** on a janitorial contract. Monday night and the last Friday of the quarter are different jobs at the same address. ## Why the residential method breaks Residential pricing rests on a quiet assumption: every visit is roughly the same visit. The same rooms, the same tasks, the same time. That assumption is what lets you say "$220 per clean" and have it mean something. A commercial contract is built on the opposite assumption. The scope *varies by design*: - Some tasks happen **every visit** — trash, restrooms, touch-point wiping. - Some happen **weekly** or **every two weeks** — vacuuming open areas, mopping hard floors. - Some happen **monthly** — high dusting, interior glass. - Some happen **quarterly** — strip and wax, carpet extraction, the jobs that close a wing. Quote that as one visit price and you either overcharge the quiet nights (and lose the bid) or eat the quarterly work for free (and lose the margin). Most first-timers manage both at once. ## The spec-sheet method The fix is the same move that fixes residential estimating — break the job into pieces small enough to be honest about — with one extra dimension: **every task gets a frequency**, and the price is a **month**, not a visit. **1. List the areas.** Offices, conference rooms, restrooms, break room, lobby, the server room they'd rather you didn't touch. Walk the space and write them down, exactly as you would rooms in a house. **2. Give every task a time *and* a frequency.** "Empty trash and reline bins, 20 minutes, every visit." "Vacuum the open floor, 45 minutes, weekly." "Machine-scrub restroom floors, 60 minutes, monthly." The frequency is scope. Writing it down is what makes your bid comparable to the incumbent's — and defensible when the client asks why yours is higher. **3. Choose visits per week.** Five nights? Three? This is the lever both sides can feel: a client who balks at the number can drop from five nights to three and *see* what it saves, instead of hearing "I can sharpen my pencil." **4. Price the month.** Multiply each task out — an every-visit task times the visits in a month, a weekly task times its weeks, a quarterly task at a third of its cost per month — sum it, apply your hourly rate, and you have the number commercial clients actually budget with: **a monthly amount**. Facilities budgets are monthly. Bids that speak the budget's language read as professional before anyone checks the math. ## The spec sheet is the sales document Here's the part that wins contracts: present the scope **grouped by frequency**. One block for what happens every visit, one for weekly, one for monthly, one for quarterly. A facilities manager comparing three bids can't see the work — the building is cleaned when nobody's watching. What they *can* see is the paper. A bare monthly number invites exactly one comparison: is it bigger or smaller than the other bids? A spec sheet invites the comparison you want: *this bid includes quarterly strip and wax and the other two don't mention floors at all.* The documented scope at a higher price beats the mystery number more often than you'd think — and when it doesn't, you've lost a client who was always going to churn on price. The spec sheet keeps earning after the signature, too. Three months in, when somebody asks why the conference-room glass wasn't done this week, the answer is a line on a document both sides agreed to: interior glass is monthly, and it was done on the 4th. ## Where the software comes in You can build all of this in a spreadsheet — one tab for the scope, one for the math, one for the version you actually sent. Plenty of companies do, and the spreadsheet works right up until the second contract, when it becomes two spreadsheets. In [BlastoClean](/features), you set what work your company does — residential, commercial or both — in Settings, and commercial quotes carry the whole method natively: every task takes a frequency, you choose visits per week, and the pricing engine works out the month from your own task library and hourly rate — the same engine that prices a residential quote, so nothing is guessed. The customer-facing quote comes out as a proper spec sheet grouped by frequency, contract terms print right on it, and when the contract is booked, every work order lists the every-visit work as tonight's checklist and tags the periodic tasks with their frequency — so the quarterly floor work gets planned into the week instead of ambushing a Tuesday. And if you'd rather not type the scope at all: Magic Quote handles bid walkthroughs the same way it handles houses. Walk the suite with the facilities manager, saying what happens nightly and what happens quarterly as you go, and the draft comes back with the frequencies attached — priced by your library, ready to review. ## Bid the month The habit to build is a small one: stop asking "what does a visit cost here?" and start asking "what does a month of this building look like?" Every task, a time and a frequency. Visits per week as the dial. One monthly number, backed by a spec sheet that shows exactly what it buys. That's the whole method. The building manager gets a document they can defend to their boss, and you get a contract where the quiet nights and the quarterly floors are both, finally, in the price.