Bid offices, clinics and night-cleaning routes from your own costs
Your wages, insurance and supply costs go in once. From then on, every building is bid from what it takes your crew to clean it, and the cents per foot comes out at the end as a check.
- Know what an hour of night cleaning really costs Your cleaners' pay, your own pay, payroll costs, the janitorial bond and insurance become one break-even rate per billable hour.
- Price the whole building, task by task Trash and recycling, restrooms, desks and touchpoints, floors, the drive and the supplies each get a line.
- Bid per visit, per month and per foot Two, three or five nights a week and once a week come out side by side, on 4.33 weeks a month, with the cents per square foot shown.
- Stop cleaning minutes you never priced Lock-up and alarm codes, supply closet checks, your own inspections and a slower new hire sit on a checklist that has to be answered.
- Hand the office manager a clean one-page bid Frequencies, monthly and yearly prices and your janitorial terms, ready to print or save as a PDF.
- See which accounts pay The Job Log records every bid, won or lost, and the real hours each building takes month by month.
- One-time payment, no subscription
- Instant download
- Excel and Google Sheets
How it turns a walkthrough into a monthly janitorial bid
Six tabs take you from your supplier's prices to a signed-off bid, and then to a monthly check on each building.
- Start HereRead this first: the fill-in order and what each cell colour means. About one evening.
- Shop SetupInsurance and bond, storage, phone and software, your evening cleaners and you, worked into your break-even rate for each billable hour.
- Price ListLiners, chemicals, gloves, pads and paper goods at your supplier's prices, each dated so old prices stand out.
- QuoteMinutes for each task from your walkthrough, the drive from your last building and the checklist. It gives the price per visit and per month for each frequency, the cents per foot, and a small start-up charge for the first clean.
- Customer QuoteThe bid the building sees: scope, frequency options, monthly and yearly prices and terms.
- Job LogThe real hours go in each month, so a building that runs long shows up before the contract renews.
What is a break-even rate? It is the amount each hour your crew spends inside a customer's building has to earn to pay all the wages, yours as well, and the insurance, bond and other running costs, with no profit yet. What you bill above it is your profit. The true hourly rate guide shows the math.
Prefilled example built-in
The file comes filled in with a made-up janitorial company and its $1,618.15 a month office bid, so you see a finished quote before you type in your own numbers.
The example company is an owner and two part-time evening cleaners, with a break-even of $36.15 per billable hour. The building is a 6,000 sq ft office, mostly carpet with about 1,500 sq ft of tile, 2 restrooms, a breakroom and 14 desks, cleaned 3 nights a week.
| A | B | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Part of the price, per visit | Amount |
| 2 | Supplies, cleaning labour and the drive | $87.29 |
| 3 | Easy-to-miss minutes (lock-up, restock check, inspections) | $10.64 |
| 4 | Supplies markup, cushion and profit | $26.54 |
| 5 | Price per visit, 3 nights a week | $124.47 |
At 13 visits a month that is $1,618.15, about 27 cents a square foot a month. The $26.54 a visit is kept after every wage, the owner's included, and the account earns about $47 per labour hour. The full build-up, with the frequency spread, is on how much to charge for commercial cleaning.
$1,660
That is what the easy-to-miss lines alone added to a year of 3-nights-a-week cleaning for this example office. It is about 33 times what the calculator costs. Miss them once and the file has paid for itself.
- One-time payment, no subscription
- Instant download
- Excel and Google Sheets
Why bidding on square footage alone loses money
A lot of janitorial bids start as a cents-per-foot number, from a price you heard or a rate a competitor charges. Square footage can't tell you how many restrooms there are, how many desks, how much hard floor, or how many people use the building all day.
Take two 6,000 sq ft offices. One has 2 restrooms and 14 desks; the other has 4 restrooms and a busy breakroom. If the second takes 30 extra minutes a night, at the example's $36.15 break-even rate that is $18.08 of labour a visit, or about $235 a month at 3 nights a week. Bid both at the same cents per foot and the busier one eats most of its own profit.
The calculator starts from the minutes each building takes, then shows what that works out to per square foot. You can still quote in cents a foot, but it will be a number that pays for that building.
Lock-up, restock checks and the other night-cleaning minutes it catches
The Quote tab won't call a bid ready until each of these lines has a Yes, No or N/A:
- Keys, the alarm code and locking up, every night, even though nobody calls it cleaning.
- The supply closet check, so you don't run out mid-shift and make a second trip.
- Your own quality walk-throughs, spread across every visit so they're paid for.
- The drive from your last building, time and miles, on every visit.
- The first clean and the walkthrough, charged once as a start-up fee instead of hidden in the monthly price.
- A new cleaner is slower than you. Left as No in the example on purpose, so the warning stays until you add the extra time a new hire takes.
Exactly what you get
A single .xlsx file, downloaded as soon as you pay. It runs in Excel and Google Sheets, with no monthly fee, app or login.
- The six-tab calculator, set up for recurring commercial cleaning.
- A complete example janitorial company, with its office bid priced so you can follow every number.
- Janitorial terms you can edit, covering scope, holidays, paper goods and extras, with additions handled on a written change order.
- A Job Log that shows which buildings run over their hours each month, the habit covered in job costing.
How it compares
Most owners price a job one of these ways. Here is what each one gives you.
| Copying another company's price | A free estimate template | Estimating software | This calculator | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starts from your own costs | No | No | Varies | Yes |
| Makes you answer the easy-to-miss costs | No | No | Varies | Yes |
| Shows which jobs made money | No | No | Varies | Yes |
| Works in Excel and Google Sheets | – | Yes | No | Yes |
| Cost | Free | Free | Usually a monthly fee | $49.95 once |
Who it's for: small janitorial and office cleaning companies
It fits owner-operators and commercial cleaning companies of about 1 to 15 people cleaning offices, clinics, churches and shops on a schedule. If you still clean your own buildings at night, you enter just yourself; if you run a crew of part-timers, you enter each one. A 2,000 sq ft suite or a 40,000 sq ft building, the bid comes from the minutes it takes, so different buildings are no problem.
It is not for large contractors bidding multi-site contracts with estimating software already in place, one-off strip-and-wax or carpet jobs, or anyone who only wants a blank fill-in bid form. Homes are priced differently too; the house cleaning estimate calculator is built for that. For your break-even rate on its own, try the free true hourly rate calculator.
Stop bidding offices on a guessed cents-per-foot number. Price every building from your own cleaning time, wages and drive, catch the minutes that usually get missed, and see which accounts made money.
Commercial Cleaning Pricing Calculator
$49.95 one-time
Buy now and download- One-time payment, no subscription
- Instant download
- Excel and Google Sheets