---
title: "Commercial cleaning mode · BlastoClean docs"
description: "Set what work your company does — residential, commercial or both — and what commercial quotes unlock: task frequencies, monthly pricing, contract terms, net-terms billing, receivables aging and GPS proof of service."
url: "https://www.blastoclean.com/docs/commercial-cleaning-mode"
---

# Commercial cleaning mode

Running the company · Web and mobile · 5 min read · updated August 13, 2026

**Choose residential, commercial or both in Settings → Company; commercial quotes then carry a frequency on every task and price as a monthly amount with contract terms, while customers can hold net payment terms with consolidated monthly invoices, the Receivables report ages what is owed from each invoice’s due date, and crews clock in and out of visits with GPS.**

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](/docs/setting-up-your-company).

## 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.

## 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 engine works out what a month of the mixed scope costs — using the same
task times, multipliers and hourly rate as any other quote (see
[Pricing a quote](/docs/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 itself uses the app's ordinary scheduling, where a
[recurring schedule](/docs/recurring-schedules) runs on one weekday: book a
weekly schedule for each service day, so a five-night contract is five weekly
series, one per weekday. Each series booked from the accepted quote suggests a
per-visit price that spreads the month over the visits it covers — the monthly
total × 12 ÷ 52 ÷ visits per week — so five nightly series each carry their
share. The consolidated invoice then totals the month's actual completed
visits, so a month with five service-Mondays bills a little more than one with
four — and it averages out to the quoted monthly amount over the year.

## 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](/docs/invoices-and-payments).

To watch what all of this is doing to your cash, the **Receivables** 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](/docs/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](/docs/the-mobile-app).
