CleanlyRun Janitorial Bidware walks you through a cleaning bid step by step in the browser: choose the work, enter the spaces, review the workloaded hours on its pricing screen, and send a finished proposal with a table of contents. For an operator still learning to bid, that guidance is the whole point. This page is for the operator whose bids have outgrown a fixed script.
What CleanlyRun does well
CleanlyRun is a web-based bid builder that has walked cleaning companies through proposals for years. You move through a fixed set of steps while the workloading model turns your square footage and frequencies into hours. The pricing screen then shows your cost basis, with a profit margin you can adjust before the bid goes out. The finished proposal reads like it came from a company twice your size. It also prices work beyond the nightly janitorial contract, construction cleanup and apartment move-outs among them, and can carry supply sales on the same bid.
None of that is in question here. It sits in the wider market on the bidding software guide next to CleanGuru and Route BID. If CleanGuru is the other name on your shortlist, the CleanGuru alternative page covers it. The question this page asks is narrower: what happens when the script the wizard walks you through stops matching how your company actually prices work.
Where the guided builder stops short
A guided bid builder is a script. The steps come in the vendor's order, and the workloading behind the price is the same model every other subscriber runs. That is exactly right for a standard office bid or the first floor-care quote you have ever priced. It starts to pinch when the account in front of you is won on something the steps never ask about: a route density only your crews achieve, or a labor-burden rule you negotiated for one campus.
The adjustable margin helps, and it is still a dial on someone else's model. Nudging a default percentage is a different job from pricing the account on your own rules. And once the proposal is sent, it lives in the bid tool. The walkthrough notes and the pricing history sit in one more app your account records have to be reconciled against.
Where a custom build fits instead
Colby builds the bid walkthrough around the way your estimator already works, then wires the result into the systems that run the account. For one janitorial operator, the rep captured the walkthrough on a phone inside the building, and the priced, formatted quote was out before they reached the lot. The company's own pricing logic did the work in between. You can see the full version on the instant quoting use case.
The guided flow mirrors how your estimator walks a building: your service lines and your space types, in the order your estimator actually walks them. Nothing the script never asks about gets lost on a legal pad.
Labor burden and negotiated add-ons price the way you decided they should, per account, instead of a shared workloading default with the margin nudged at the end.
A won proposal turns into the account record and the scope your crews are scheduled against, so nobody re-keys the walkthrough into the systems that run the work.
How to choose
If you are newer to bidding, or your pricing follows standard production rates and you want a proven guide you can start using this week, CleanlyRun is a sound choice and a custom build would be overkill. Buy the subscription and move on.
The case for building shows up when the pricing is your edge, or when the proposal needs to become an account without being re-keyed. Colby starts with a three-week discovery that maps how a bid moves through your company, then delivers a readout: a prioritized menu of builds you choose from. You own what we build, and we host and maintain it. The fastest way to see where you stand is to start a quote or score your operation.
Tell us what you are evaluating. We will reply within one business day and walk you through what the custom path would look like for your operation, including whether a discovery is worth it before you commit to a platform.
Reply within 1 business day · NDA-friendly · No build prices before discovery