Software for electrical contractors

Sunday evening, kitchen table, third quote of the weekend, and perhaps one of the three will land. That unpaid time is the largest single cost in a contracting business and it appears in no set of accounts. Software for electrical contractors covers scheduling, job sheets and invoicing perfectly well, and leaves that evening exactly where it was.

Where the unpaid hours are

Quoting happens after work. The takeoff, the materials, the margin, the covering note. Four evenings a week on quotes, of which perhaps one in three converts. It is the largest block of unpaid time in a contracting business and it is invisible because nobody bills it.
Certificates get typed twice. Written on site, typed up at home. The information already exists; the second pass exists only because there is no path between the notepad and the document.
Variations live in a conversation. "While you're here, can you do…" is agreed on site and remembered differently by two people four weeks later. That argument is the most expensive fifteen minutes in the trade.
Chasing payment is nobody's evening job either. The invoice went out, nothing came back, and the reminder gets sent when someone remembers. Money that is thirty days late for no reason other than that.

What gets built around the system you keep

Quote assembly from your own price book and your own past jobs: a first draft with materials, hours and margin already in it, for you to correct rather than start from a blank page.
Certificates and job sheets generated from what was captured on site — spoken, photographed or ticked — instead of typed a second time at the kitchen table.
Variations captured at the moment they are agreed: a few words and a photo, timestamped, attached to the job. It ends the argument before it starts.
Payment chasing on a schedule, in your tone, escalating to you rather than to a solicitor.

What it must not do alone

Send a quote without you reading it. A price that goes out unchecked is a job priced by a machine, and that is the one mistake that costs a whole contract.
Sign a certificate. That is your qualification and your liability; the machine assembles the paperwork, you sign it.
Agree a variation. It records what was said. Agreeing is yours.
Set margin. It uses the margin you set and flags when a job's mix means the usual figure will not hold.

Wait, if any of this is you

You have no price book — a set of rates you actually use. Building that is the first job, and it is worth doing even if nothing gets automated afterwards.
You quote fewer than a handful of jobs a month. The payback here is proportional to how many evenings you lose.
You are mid-way through changing your main system. Wait for the move.

Built before, on other paperwork

Photo factory — documents produced rather than read, at volume: one input in, a finished set of materials out. One real batch was 32 items in a single run — the same machinery a quote pack is assembled by.
Returns & defects handler — judgement applied consistently the moment something lands, with one batch to sign off each morning. A variation log wants exactly that shape: captured immediately, approved deliberately.

What contractors ask first

Will this replace my current software for electrical contractors?

No, and you should be suspicious of anyone who opens with that. Scheduling, job sheets and invoicing are well covered. What is missing is quoting, certificates, variations and chasing — and those are built around what you already run.

How does it quote without knowing my prices?

It does not. It uses your price book and your finished jobs, which is why the first piece of work is usually getting those into a usable state. That part has value on its own: most contractors find two or three rates that have not moved since before the last price rise.

Is a machine-written quote going to embarrass me?

Only if it goes out unread, which is why it does not. You get a draft with the materials, hours and margin filled in, and you change what is wrong. The evening you save is the assembly, not the judgement.

What about certificates — is that legal?

The document is assembled from what you recorded; you check and sign it. Your signature and your qualification carry the same weight they always did. Nothing about the responsibility moves, and any system that suggests otherwise is one to walk away from.

I work alone. Is this only for bigger firms?

Quoting evenings and typed-twice certificates hurt a one-van business proportionally more, because there is nobody else to hand them to. The build is smaller too. What matters is how many quotes a month you write, not how many vans you run.

What happens if you want to take this further

You send three real quotes and one certificate, including a job you lost. I read them and tell you which parts of that assembly can be drafted for you, which cannot, and what state your price book would have to be in first. That is the free hour. If it turns out your quoting is already tight and the evenings are going somewhere else, you will hear that instead.

Book that hour →