Job management software for electricians: a UK guide

Last updated: August 2026

It is half past eight on a Tuesday evening. The consumer unit change went fine and the customer was pleased, but the invoice cannot go out because the certificate is still half finished in a different app. Tomorrow starts with a fault find that could take an hour or could take a day. And there are three quotes from last week that nobody has followed up, because there was no time.

That evening is the real specification. An electrical contracting business is not short of software. It is short of software that knows the certificate and the invoice describe the same job.

Three or four systems, none of them talking

“Electrician” covers at least four business shapes that share a qualification and very little else. The one van domestic sole trader working for householders and small landlords. The two to ten person firm doing householders in the morning and a shop fit in the afternoon, which is the centre of gravity for job management software. The contracting firm working under a main contractor on someone else’s programme, paid on applications with retentions held. And the specialist service line, EV charge points or fire alarm or data, usually bolted onto one of the first two.

The sector is larger than it feels from inside a van. IBISWorld puts it at £36.2bn across 49,646 businesses, growing revenue at 2.5% a year to 2026, while Firmbase counts 29,130 active electrical contracting companies. The gap is definitional, registered companies against all enterprises including sole traders, rather than a contradiction.

Ask a small firm where the work lives and the answer is usually three to five places at once: a paper diary or wall planner in the office, WhatsApp with the customer and again as the internal group, Google Calendar, a spreadsheet for jobs in progress, a separate certificate app, accounting software bought for VAT, and possibly a job management product on top. None of them talks to the others. The diary is in one place, the quote in another, the certificate in a third and the invoice in a fourth, all describing one job at one address.

That matters more than it used to, because engineer time is the binding constraint. A shortage of qualified electricians has been the top reported obstacle to growth for twelve consecutive quarters, cited by 37% of respondents to the Building Engineering Business Survey, and electrical apprenticeship starts fell 5.5% in the year to February 2026 while starts overall rose 4.1%. You cannot recruit your way past an admin problem at the moment, so an hour a day recovered from retyping is worth more than it looks.

The certificate is what releases the money

Every job ends in a document. Under BS 7671 that is an Electrical Installation Certificate for a new installation or any work involving a new circuit, a Minor Electrical Installation Works Certificate for an addition or alteration to an existing circuit, or an Electrical Installation Condition Report for a periodic inspection. The EICR is a report, not a certificate, whatever the letting agent calls it, and issuing a minor works certificate for a new circuit is the classic error.

Two consequences get ignored by most software. The person who ordered the work receives the original and the person who issued it retains a duplicate, so your copy is an obligation rather than a courtesy. And it has to be kept: the NICEIC Approved Contractor Scheme Rules require records, including specifications, certificates and competence records, to be held for a minimum of six years.

Keep an eye on the standard itself. BS 7671:2018+A4:2026, the Orange Book, was published on 15 April 2026 and fully replaces the previous version from 15 October 2026. It is consolidated rather than a bolt on, and it adds a chapter on stationary secondary batteries, sections on functional earthing for ICT equipment and Power over Ethernet, and a major revision of Section 710 on medical locations. There is no nineteenth edition. BS 7671 is amended, not re-editioned. The current status is on the IET’s Amendment 4:2026 page.

The real operational problem is neither certification nor invoicing on its own. It is that both are produced from the same job data, typed twice, in two subscriptions, and the second one is what the customer is waiting for before paying. Customers do withhold, and the forums carry both halves of that standoff.

If your business is mostly periodic inspection rather than installation, that round has its own economics and its own guide: see EICR and PAT testing software. Renewables sit in solar, battery and heat pump work.

Part P is an England and Wales rule, and Wales is not England

Most content on this subject says “Part P of the UK Building Regulations”. There is no such thing: Part P applies in England and Wales, and does not exist in Scotland or Northern Ireland.

In England the notifiable categories have been three since 6 April 2013: a new circuit, a consumer unit replacement, and any addition or alteration to a circuit in a special location, broadly a room containing a bath or shower. Notifiable work is either self certified through a competent person scheme or notified to building control in advance and paid for; everything else still has to comply with BS 7671. Check the current position against Approved Document P and the GOV.UK list of authorised schemes. Commercially, what matters is that notification is a per job obligation with a deadline and nothing in a paper diary to prompt it, and that missing it surfaces years later at the point of sale as a regularisation application charged at a premium.

Wales diverged on 31 July 2014 and has its own Approved Document P. The 2013 English narrowing did not carry across automatically, so the Welsh notifiable list differs. Check both if you work either side of that border.

Scotland works differently again: no Part P and no self certification under it. The framework is the Building (Scotland) Act 2003 and the 2004 Regulations, with mandatory standards 4.5 and 4.6, and the control mechanism is a building warrant, never a notification. Northern Ireland has its own Building Regulations and Technical Booklets, with BS 7671 still the wiring standard.

That GOV.UK list was last updated in March 2018 and still names ELECSA, which Certsure retired by November 2022; an ELECSA logo on an old certificate means NICEIC now.

EV charge points: a small job with a long paper trail

A 7kW home charger is a dedicated circuit, a load assessment and an earthing arrangement decision: in electrical terms, an afternoon. The admin runs longer than the job, which is why EV charger installer admin deserves its own workflow.

It is a new circuit, so in England and Wales it is notifiable, and the DNO has to be told either way: small connections normally take the G98 connect and notify route, where the operator hears about it afterwards, while larger loads need a G99 application approved before energising. Thresholds and turnaround vary by operator, so work from your own DNO’s published process. On new build there is also Approved Document S in England, in force 15 June 2022, requiring a 7kW chargepoint on a new dwelling with associated parking.

Then the grant. Only an OZEV authorised installer can claim, and it is OZEV, not OLEV. The open schemes run to 31 March 2027 and cover renters and flat owners, on street parking, residential landlords, workplaces and education. Rates rose from a previous maximum of £350 to up to £500 per socket on 1 April 2026, and three further schemes closed on 26 May 2026.

The claim is where jobs come unstuck. One invoice per application, the chargepoint make, model and serial number, and photographic evidence: a close up of the chargepoint, a close up of the model and serial plate, the chargepoint with the parking space, and wide shots of the building and the space. Those photographs are taken on the day by the person on site, who is also finishing the certificate. Miss one and the claim fails after the customer was quoted the price net of the grant. The installer guidance on GOV.UK carries the full list.

Quoting, deposits and getting paid

A rewire is routinely put out to three electricians, and the quote that wins usually shows the work rather than a single number. Structuring it, taking a deposit and chasing what is owed are covered in quoting with a deposit. One point specific to the doorstep: a quote agreed in a customer’s kitchen is an off premises contract, and the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 give the consumer a fourteen day cancellation right, so starting work inside it needs their express request.

On commercial work the money sticks for structural reasons. The Building Engineering Business Survey published in December 2024 found 76% reporting private sector clients paying later than 30 days and 49% saying the same of the public sector, with over 40% holding between 2.5% and 10% of turnover in retentions. Reforms announced in March 2026 would cap payment at 60 days, remove the opt out from statutory 8% interest and ban retention clauses, but came without commencement dates.

CIS is where all of that meets the invoice, and a small firm is commonly on both sides of it in the same month. The deduction rates are 20% for a registered and verified subcontractor, 30% where they cannot be matched, and 0% with gross payment status, and deduction is from labour only, excluding materials, VAT and the CITB levy. Getting that split wrong is a direct cash error. The VAT domestic reverse charge sits alongside it and never touches work for a householder, because a domestic customer is an end user. Check your own position with your accountant, and see CIS invoicing for subcontractors.

Making Tax Digital for Income Tax is live alongside it, at £50,000 of qualifying income since 6 April 2026, dropping to £30,000 in April 2027 and £20,000 in April 2028.

How Dispatch helps

Dispatch puts the whole job in one place, on the phone that is already in your pocket. The customer, the site address, the priority, the booked visit, the photographs, the write up, the quote and the invoice all live on one record, so nothing is retyped and nothing is hunted for.

Send a customer a private link and they fill in your own form with no account and no app, attaching photographs and signing on screen. Book the visit onto a week calendar and the customer gets a confirmation automatically. On site, the completion report captures the write up and up to twelve photographs before the job can be closed, which is exactly the discipline an OZEV grant claim needs, since four photographs decide whether it pays. Certificates, RAMS and method statements attach to the job and stay for its life. Turn CIS on in Settings and every invoice splits labour from materials and applies the right rate on its own.

Your NICEIC, NAPIT or ELECSA number prints on every quote and invoice. Enter it once in Settings and Dispatch carries it onto the paperwork from then on — on a quote it is a trust signal at the moment somebody is choosing between three of them. It is frozen onto each document as it is issued, so renewing your registration never rewrites paperwork you have already sent.

Charges you raise every week can be saved once and added in a tap — a call-out fee, an out-of-hours uplift, a consumer unit, waste disposal. Each remembers its price, its VAT rate and whether it is labour or materials, so a rushed invoice at the end of the day is still a consistent one.

An invoice can be split into parts, each payable from its own date. That covers a rewire billed in stages so you are not funding the materials yourself, and it covers retention on commercial work — the usual 5% held back, half released at practical completion and half after the defects period. The invoice keeps its full value throughout, because retention is money held back rather than a discount. Dispatch will not chase a part before its date arrives, so a settled first instalment does not produce an automatic reminder demanding money your contract says is not owed for another eleven months.

Pricing materials, there is a markup calculator on the line itself — type what it cost you and the percentage you work on, and it fills in the price. Only the price is saved.

Then invoice from the doorstep and take payment by card, into your own Stripe account, before you drive away. Overdue invoices chase themselves at 3, 10 and 21 days in your name.

What it will not do is produce the certificate: EICRs and installation certificates still come from your certification software, and the finished PDF attaches to the job beside the invoice for the same work.

Every feature is on every plan, the caps are on seats and templates only, and Firestore, Storage and all compute run in the UK. There is a free plan, so you can put a real job through it this week.