PressureWashingBossPro Blog — Commercial Accounts

Quoting Commercial Pressure Washing Bids With Online Approval

Commercial bids are where accounts are won or lost before a drop of water hits the concrete. A manager asks for a price on the drive-thru and dumpster pad. If the bid shows up days later as a loose email with a number in it, they might forget about it, lose it, or go with whoever answered first. If it shows up the same day, clear about what is included, with a button to approve it, the account is much more likely to be yours.

Bids Start With Knowing the Account

Reports by account, covered in Reports by Account: Knowing What Each Commercial Pressure Washing Client Is Worth, tell you which kinds of accounts pay best. Bidding is how you go get more of them.

In PressureWashingBossPro, a commercial bid is an estimate, built the same way as a residential estimate but usually covering recurring work and sometimes several locations. The difference is mostly in what goes on it.

Building the Bid From Your Service List

Estimates are built from your own service list. For commercial work, that list might include:

• Storefront and sidewalk, monthly
• Drive-thru lane, monthly
• Dumpster pad, monthly
• Parking garage deck, per square foot
• Pool deck, quarterly
• Fleet wash, per unit
• Gum removal, one-time

Each service carries your own price. Pick the services that match the account, adjust quantities, and the estimate totals itself. Estimate templates and packages help when you bid the same kind of account often. A “Drive-Thru Package” with the lane, pad and entry sidewalk saves building it from scratch every time.

Surfaces and Square Feet on the Bid

Job details go on the estimate: surfaces, square feet, surface type, method and access notes. Measure the sidewalk, lane or pad from the satellite view on the property map, and estimates can price off those measurements. That keeps commercial bids grounded in real numbers instead of a guess from the parking lot.

When the estimate is approved, those job details carry onto the job. The crew's first visit already shows “Drive-Thru, Dumpster Pad · 1,800 sq ft · Hot Water” and the access notes from the site walk. Nobody types them in twice. Measuring is covered in detail in Measuring Commercial Flatwork From Satellite Before You Bid.

Online Approval

Once the bid is built, send it. The manager opens it, sees the services, the scope and the price, and approves it online. There is no printing, signing, scanning and emailing back. For a busy store manager or an HOA community manager, that makes saying yes a lot easier.

Write the bid so someone who has never seen the property can understand it. Store managers often forward bids to a district manager or an owner, and HOA managers pass them to a board. Clear service names, the surfaces, the square feet and how often each area will be washed answer most questions before they are asked. A short note on what is not included, like “rear service lane not included,” prevents arguments later.

When the bid is approved, it becomes the scheduled job. For recurring commercial work, set the location's minimum days between visits, and from then on the visits come due on the Waiting List on their own.

Follow-Up Without the Awkward Call

Commercial bids often sit. The manager means to look at it, then the lunch rush happens. Estimate follow-up emails go out on their own when a bid has not been approved, so the manager gets a reminder without you having to call and ask whether they have had a chance to look.

For bids that need more than one person's approval, like an HOA board or a district manager, two-way texting with the contact helps keep things moving. A short text like “Any questions on the pool deck bid before the board meets?” often gets an answer faster than an email.

Bidding Several Locations at Once

Restaurant groups and property managers often ask for a price on several locations together. Add each location as an address under the client, measure each one, and list each location's services on the bid with the address in the line. The manager can see exactly what each store or section costs and approve the whole package at once.

Once approved, each address runs on its own cycle, and if the client is set to Monthly, all of them land on one monthly statement. A clean bid at the start makes every month after it easier.

Not every bid is worth chasing. Very large industrial or municipal contracts with formal bid packages are a different world, covered later in this series. For the everyday storefronts, drive-thrus and HOAs that make up most commercial work, a fast, clear bid with online approval is hard to beat. To see how bids fit with the rest of commercial accounts, go back to the commercial pressure washing software page.