Some will be knowing the price of a janitorial, office-cleaning bid at is as easy as multiplying the total cleanable square feet of a building by so many dollars or cents per square foot. Unfortunately, this formula is often tossed about without even mentioning if the figures are based on a month or a year; a piece of information those new to the cleaning business would not doubt find quite valuable to know.
Per square foot figures will be ranging from $0.08 - $0.14 per sq. ft. or $0.95 - $1.50 per sq. ft., are offered up with little or no explanation; assuming it's common knowledge that the former generally refers to a monthly calculation; while the latter is meant for a yearly price estimate.
Educated Guess
Others will suggest will rely on your own experience which will simply guesstimate how long it should take to clean, and then charge so much per hour. But, that advice can be equally misleading. And the cleaning contractor with little or no experience is at a real disadvantage. The number and kind of cleaning jobs janitorial companies face can vary greatly in size, frequency and difficulty, as well as, in the actual nature of the cleaning.
Many cleaning business owners will come to realize the differences from one project to the next can be so significant; the idea of pricing jobs based on their best guess of cleaning times is simply not a reliable or effective bidding method. In fact, even if they could somehow, eventually, develop a way of personally guesstimating the price for cleaning jobs, they may still be leaving their cleaning business vulnerable.
Plain and simple, for most cleaning businesses who want to grow, bidding and estimating jobs should not rest solely on one person's shoulders. Instead, there needs to be a reliable and easy to use bidding system.
'Standardized' Production Rates
Finally, still others insist you should just use a "standard", generalized, overall, production rate to figure the hours needed to clean a building, and then again, simply charge so much per hour.
Two primary kinds of production rates in cleaning business:
One is production rates for individual cleaning tasks which will means about the much sq. ft. one person can clean in one hour... performing only one task. There are also overall cleaning production rates which generally refer to how many sq. ft. of a building can be cleaned by one person in one hour performing an entire set of what some may refer to as "standard" cleaning duties.
This production rate will approach to suggest you will simply divide the total area to be cleaned by a given 'overall', 'standard' production rate figure - take the resulting hours, and multiply by your hourly rate.
Every building is unique, and the kind, level and frequency of cleaning tasks each prospective customer wants can differ greatly in type, frequency and degree of difficulty. This makes it difficult to rely on a so-called 'standard' production rate designed to cover a whole set of so-called 'standard' type cleaning tasks... with an acceptable level of confidence the time estimates will be reliable and the resulting price decision will be a profitable.
One-size will fits all approach will fall short too which will be the best place to start.
Workloading will be the right job so you can calculate cleaning time unique to the building you're bidding on is the place we recommend most cleaning companies should start when it comes to bidding.
It is the process of figuring out a time estimate for how long a building should take to clean by basically "loading" the "work". All the cleaning tasks will be in need for performing. Workloading is the process of entering specific information about a building such as individual measurements (i.e. room dimensions), floor types (i.e. carpet, tile) and fixture counts (sinks, toilets), and then matching them up with an appropriate series of schedules consisting of specific cleaning tasks and associated production rates to generate an average per visit cleaning time.
It really all comes down to calculating an estimated cleaning time for the building you're bidding on. And when you have a calculated cleaning time, you can move forward confidently to pricing the job. Cleaning business owners will be a multiply a monthly hours estimate times a properly 'loaded' hourly rate to determine a monthly price to charge.
