JunkBossPro Blog — Property Managers & Commercial

Office Cleanouts: Desks, Cubicles and Filing Cabinets on a Junk Removal Schedule

An office moves, downsizes or remodels, and suddenly there are forty desks, a wall of filing cabinets, broken chairs, old printers and a conference table nobody can lift. The office manager has a move-out date from the landlord and a hundred other things to handle. A junk company that takes the furniture problem off her list is worth a lot to her.

From Job Sites to Office Suites

Contractor accounts are covered through Billing Contractors Monthly for Debris Hauls Across Every Job Site. Offices are a different kind of commercial client. The jobs are fewer and further between, but they are often big, and they come with building rules that homeowner jobs never have.

Walk It Before You Price It

Office cleanouts are hard to price from a phone call. “About twenty desks” can mean light laminate desks or steel monsters with attached file drawers. Put an on-site estimate visit on the schedule. It is just another job, and it lands on the Waiting List map like any other request.

On the walk-through, note:

• What is going, room by room.
• What is staying, especially anything the landlord owns.
• Which floor, and whether there is a freight elevator.
• Where the truck can park and how far the carry is.
• Whether anything needs to be taken apart, like cubicle walls.

Then build the estimate from your service list: “Office cleanout, 2 truck loads,” or a load price plus single items for the heavy pieces. Send it, and when the office approves online, the estimate becomes the scheduled job. Estimating commercial work is covered in more detail in Commercial Junk Removal Estimates: Quoting Offices, Stores and Multi-Unit Jobs for Online Approval.

Building Access

Office buildings have property managers of their own, and they have rules. Put them in the access notes on the address:

• “Check in with building security in the lobby. Bring ID.”
• “Freight elevator must be booked with building management 48 hours ahead.”
• “Loading dock on the north side, 30-minute limit.”
• “No moving through the main lobby during business hours.”

The crew sees these on the job card. If building management asks vendors for paperwork before they can work there, find out what it is early, because it can hold up the job.

Working Around the Business

Many office cleanouts happen while some of the staff are still working. Others can only happen after hours or on a weekend. Ask which, and plan for it. After-hours and weekend scheduling has its own article in After-Hours and Weekend Commercial Junk Jobs: Scheduling Around Business Hours.

If the job is during the day, set the route order so the crew arrives when the freight elevator is booked, not an hour early. Text the office manager when the crew is on the way. Automatic on-the-way and arrived alerts can do that for you if the client has them turned on.

Big Jobs, Several Loads

A full office can be 2 or 3 truck loads. Plan the dump runs. If you have two trucks, consider putting both on the job for a morning so the elevator booking is not wasted. On the dispatch board, put the office cleanout on the cleanout truck and keep the single-item truck on its own route.

Office furniture often has life left in it. If you haul usable desks and chairs to a donation center, set that as the haul-to on the load and the crew's Go button navigates there. Old electronics are a separate question: what your local transfer station or recycler takes is their call, so check their rules before you load the printers.

Files and Paperwork

Filing cabinets come with a question: are they empty? Ask the office manager to confirm in writing that every drawer has been cleared. Note it on the job. If the crew opens a drawer and finds files, they stop, photograph it and tell the office. Hauling a company's records to the dump is a problem nobody wants.

Photos and the Invoice

Before-and-after photos show the office manager and her landlord that the space was cleared. Take wide shots of each room before and after. The photos stay with the job.

The invoice should read the way the estimate did: the loads, any single items, and any dump fee overage on its own line. If the business has several locations and sends you work regularly, set them to Monthly and put each location as an address under the client.

For everything else JunkBossPro does for commercial accounts, visit the commercial junk removal software page.