How to Automate an Electrical Contracting Business

Every wiring job begins as an enquiry. It may arrive by phone, by reference or through a builder’s call. Record the source, the site and the date of the survey visit. Give each enquiry one record from the day it arrives.

At the survey, note the connected load, the point count and the drawings received. Set a date for the next follow-up. These details feed the quotation later, so they belong on the enquiry. Enquiries kept in several phones and notebooks cannot be followed up from one list.

Enter item rates, point rates and labour rates before anything else. Quotations are then built by point, item or area, the way your firm prices a floor or a flat. Rates typed afresh into each quotation drift apart over time. Keep the rate list in one place that the estimator and the owner both read.

Clients ask for revisions. Each version is kept, and the client’s approval is recorded against it. The owner can then read quotations open, won and lost by client. That report shows where enquiries are going. The estimator sees which quotations are waiting on a reply.

An approved quotation becomes a site job. The job carries floors or areas, work stages, a team, a supervisor and a snag list. Material and attendance are booked to this job and no other. One site, one record.

Set up the material master before the first site. Cable sizes, conduit, switchgear and fittings go in with the units you buy and issue in. The store keeper issues material against a named site and takes back what is unused.

Technician attendance is marked each day to the site where the person worked. Labour cost and material cost then sit on the same job.

Supervisors enter measured work by area, from a phone if they are on site. The office reads it against the approved quantities. It becomes a running account bill, with GST, advances, deductions and retention carried on the account. Nothing is retyped.

Work given to subcontractors and labour gangs is recorded the same way, with measured quantity, advances and payments made. The owner can then read site cost against billing for each job, along with client balances and payments due to subcontractors. How advances and retention apply is set with each client.

A single electrician who takes small repair calls and is paid in cash does not need this. A notebook and UPI will do. Firms that mainly build and manage whole buildings will find Construction Project Management Software closer to their work.

The system suits a contractor who quotes, runs several sites with its own technician teams and bills on measured work. Before buying, decide who enters what: the estimator, the store keeper or the supervisor. A technology audit at no charge is one way to settle that scope. Decide it early.