Commercial cleaning mode

BlastoClean serves residential and commercial cleaning companies, and the difference between the two is not cosmetic: a janitorial contract has frequencies, agreement terms and net-terms billing that a weekly house clean never needs. So the commercial machinery is switched on where it applies rather than cluttering every quote.

Choosing what work you do

In Settings → Company, set what work your company does: residential, commercial, or both. Commercial work unlocks everything below on commercial quotes.

A company that does both chooses per quote. The choice is defaulted from the property type — an office, a retail space or a medical suite starts as a commercial quote — and you can override it on any quote. Company setup in general is covered in Setting up your company.

Start from a common job

A business quote can start from a common job instead of a blank page. You can change anything it fills in. The measured bid below is still there when the building needs one.

In the web app the four are Office, Medical office, Shop, and Move-out. Picking one fills the rooms, the tasks, how often you come, how many visits a week, whether they pay by the month or by the visit, and the agreement. If the quote already has rooms, the app asks before it replaces them. See Building a quote.

On the phone the four are Office, Clinic, Store, and After a build or a move. They show only while the quote has no rooms. Picking one fills the areas, the tasks, how often, and the agreement. A second tap does not add the rooms again. See Quoting from your phone.

Bidding by the square foot

A house is estimated room by room, from minutes somebody decided on: the master bath takes twenty. A commercial building is not, and never has been. It is measured, and priced from production rates — the arithmetic the ISSA cleaning times tables publish, the arithmetic a facilities manager will check your bid against, and the reason two estimators walking the same building land within a few dollars of each other.

On a commercial quote, the areas step asks for what an estimator actually carries back from a walk:

• Square feet, on the area itself. Twelve thousand square feet of open office is typed once. Every task measured over that floor inherits the figure, so correcting a mistyped measurement corrects the whole bid rather than eleven task lines one at a time.
• Floor type — carpet, resilient, hard, concrete or mixed. It picks the starting rates you are offered, it prints on the spec, and it tells the crew what to put in the van.

Each task then carries the rate it runs at: vacuuming open carpet at around 3,000 square feet an hour, emptying bins at 12,000. The minutes are derived, not typed. Change the rate and the time follows, which is what stops a bid disagreeing with itself — and you can still lower a rate where the job deserves it, because detail vacuuming around furniture is roughly half the speed of an upright over a cleared floor.

Restrooms are the exception the trade already knows, and the app follows it: they are priced per fixture, not per square foot. A 400 square foot restroom with twelve fixtures is not the same job as one with three, and no floor-area rate can tell them apart. Count the toilets, urinals and sinks and the restroom prices from that instead.

Areas the app cannot measure — anything you have not walked yet — simply price at nothing until somebody types a real number. That is deliberate: an unmeasured area is visibly different from an area that takes no time.

You can sketch one area in the browser before you open a quote. The free commercial cleaning bid calculator uses one square footage, one speed, and what you pay per hour, and it labels its starting numbers as examples you should change. The quote in the app is still the spec sheet: every task has its own rate and its own frequency.

Frequencies on the scope of work

On a commercial quote, every task line carries a frequency: every visit, weekly, every two weeks, monthly, or quarterly. One contract can therefore say trash and restrooms every visit, carpets weekly, high dusting monthly and strip-and-wax quarterly, without splitting into separate quotes.

The quote prices this as a monthly amount: choose the visits per week, and the month is worked out from the same task times, multipliers and hourly rate as any other quote (see Pricing a quote). The customer-facing quote presents the scope as a spec sheet grouped by frequency, so what happens every visit, what happens weekly and what happens quarterly each read as their own block.

When the quote is booked, each work order lists the every-visit tasks as tonight's checklist and the periodic tasks — weekly, every two weeks, monthly, quarterly — tagged with their frequency. The app does not pick the night a periodic task happens; the crew lead or the office plans it into the week, and the monthly price covers it wherever it lands.

Booking uses the same scheduling as any other quote. A weekly job that comes more than once a week is one schedule with those days, not a separate schedule for each day. Each visit carries its share of the month: the monthly total × 12 ÷ 52 ÷ visits per week. The consolidated invoice then totals the month's actual completed visits, so a month with five Mondays bills a little more than one with four. Over the year it averages out to the quoted monthly amount.

Contract terms

The commercial quote editor has a contract terms card: contract length in months, auto-renewal, an annual price escalation percentage, and a cancellation notice period. The terms print on the quote the customer accepts and follow the schedule when the quote is booked.

Two of them keep working after the signature:

• Renewal. The dashboard warns you when a contract approaches its renewal date, so the conversation happens before the date rather than after it.
• Escalation. The annual increase is applied through the same dated price-change flow as any other raise: the new amount takes effect from its date and earlier visits keep the old price. One difference: for a contract escalation the customer is always emailed before the change takes effect — the choice of whether to notify the customer applies only to price changes you schedule by hand.

Net terms, PO numbers and monthly invoices

On the customer form, a customer can carry payment terms — Net 30, for example — and a PO number. Invoices for that customer then get due dates, and the PO number rides along.

A customer can also be switched to consolidated monthly invoicing: one invoice covering the month's completed visits, instead of an invoice per visit. Other customers are unaffected — residential customers keep per-visit billing. Invoicing in general is covered in Invoices and payments.

To watch what all of this is doing to your cash, the Money owed report in Reports ages everything owed into 0–7, 8–30, 31–60 and over-60 days — counted from the invoice's due date when the customer has payment terms, and from completion otherwise. It sits beside the other reports described in The dashboard and reports.

Proof of service

Commercial work happens in empty buildings, so the visit record carries its own evidence. Cleaners clock in and clock out of a visit from the mobile app, with GPS: the office sees arrival and departure times and whether the crew was on site, as a distance from the property.

If nobody has clocked in by a set number of minutes after a visit's scheduled start, the owner is alerted — a missed-clean alert — so a skipped visit is found the same evening rather than when the client calls.

Clocking out fills in the visit's actual minutes, which feed the estimated-vs-actual report. The visit itself, and the app the crew does this from, are covered in The mobile app.