No different from a large house - count the windows and times that either by what you charge per window or by the time it will take you - internally I add 50% - don't forget to incorporate any long travel times into the price
generally commercial 'contracts' are the same as residential they just role month to month - unless its a 'proper' tender with a set amount of cleans over x number of years - this usually involves sh!t loads of useless paperwork and takes hours out of your life!
Take note of the payment terms and/or specify your payment terms - don't be taken in a find your waiting 60/90 days for payment
Darran
I would also like to add our experience to Darran's reply.
The one local business we deal with has their accounts and payment office in Cheshire. Their cheque run is the last day of the month. If we do the job in January the job needs to be signed off and approved at branch level before the end of January. It will then get onto the cheque run at the end of February. Depending on how they feel (my experience) those cheques may be posted out within a few days but I know of several ocassions where they were held back for 3 weeks.
They allow themselves 4 working days to get branch approval for the invoice which I email to them. If I did the job on the 30th of January then they would only have approval by the 2nd or 3rd of February which means the cheque will only get onto the cheque run at the end of March for postage in April.
So we do the job in the 3rd week of the month to allow for their accounting procedure.
You must make sure you have a valid order number for the job you are doing. If we quote a wrong order number they just reject the invoice but don't query it with us. To make things easier we now have a valid order number which covers us for a year.
A few days after I have emailed the invoices I email a query to the accounts dept with regard to the expected payment schedule. I've had several sarcastic responses but they can only close off the query once they have 'closed off' the invoice for payment. I get the impression that a query is counted against accounts dept performance, but that's not my problem.
TBH, had I know about the games they play with regards to payment, I would have added another £50 to the price just because of the drama.
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