Job costing app for electricians

What to track on every electrical job

A sparky's week is a mix of short service calls and longer installs, and the two lose money in different places. Service calls leak through travel, wholesaler runs and the second visit. Installs leak through rough-in hours and extras nobody wrote down. Track these lines against every job and both kinds of leak show up:

• Labour by stage: rough-in, fit-off, testing, and the clean-up nobody quotes
• Travel and pick-ups: the drive, the wholesaler counter, and the trip back for the part you were short
• Materials: cable by the metre, conduit, fittings, protection devices, and the sundries that get forgotten
• Testing and paperwork: the time it takes to test, fill in your state's compliance certificate and send it
• Variations: every extra point, circuit or fault found, priced and approved before you do the work
• Subbies and hire: trenching, a plasterer to patch the holes, an elevated work platform

In TrackYaTradie each of these lands on the job. Your sparkies and apprentices log their hours per day from their own phones, supply costs go on as they are bought, and the job's profit updates as each one comes in.

Pricing electrical work: by the hour, per point or a fixed price

There are three common ways to price electrical work, and one business can use all three:

• By the hour plus materials suits fault finding and service work, where you cannot see the problem until you open it up. Set a minimum charge that covers the travel and the first hour, so a twenty-minute fix still pays for the hour it took out of your day.
• Per point suits new work and renos with a clear count of power points, lights and switches. Build each point once as a price list item with its labour, cable and fittings, then quote by quantity. Re-check the point price whenever cable or fitting prices move.
• A fixed price suits jobs you have done many times: a switchboard upgrade, a downlight changeover, a run of power points. Write down what is included and what is not, especially what happens if the existing wiring fails testing.

Whichever method you use, start from what an hour of your time really costs. In the electrician example on the tradie hourly rate calculator, wages, super, overheads and the van come to about $104 an hour before any profit. Charge out below that and every job loses money however busy you are. Then add your margin the right way: for a 20% margin, divide the cost by 0.8 instead of adding 20% on top. The markup vs margin calculator shows the gap.

A worked example: a switchboard upgrade

Here is a single-phase switchboard upgrade, priced and then tracked. The numbers are illustrative, not a benchmark for your area, and the hourly cost is the $104 from the calculator example.

The quote's assumptions also say that faults found in the existing wiring during testing will be priced as a variation before any repair work. That one line decides how this job ends.

On day two, two circuits fail insulation resistance testing. Fixing them takes four more hours and $180 of parts. The profit-at-risk alert fires just before the quoted 10.5 hours run out: at that point costs are $2,672, or 86% of the $3,115 price, with four hours of work still to go. You find out on site, while you can still talk to the client, not when the invoice goes out.

Send the variation from your phone, the client approves it by typing their name on the link, and it goes onto the final invoice. Without that line in the assumptions, you have a harder conversation and a job that made $27. Variations: how to price them and get them approved covers the wording.

Callouts and installs in the same app

A one-hour callout and a six-month fit-out are both just jobs. A callout needs a client, a description and the hours and parts that go on it, and it becomes an invoice before you leave the driveway. A bigger install gets a quote from your templates, payment stages such as deposit, rough-in, fit-off and completion (each a percentage of the price), a checklist for each stage, and photos of the board and the cable runs before the walls close up.

New accounts set up for electrical work start with three quote templates to adjust: an LED downlight upgrade, a single-phase switchboard upgrade and an install of three double power points. Their prices are placeholders, so put your own in before you quote.

What TrackYaTradie does not do for electricians

It is a job costing, quoting and invoicing app, not a full electrical contracting system. Know the gaps before you trial it:

• No compliance certificate forms. Complete your state's certificate the way you do now, and attach a copy to the job if you want it on file.
• No test and tag register, no stock or van inventory, and no purchase orders.
• No dispatch map or GPS tracking. The calendar rosters tradies onto jobs by the day.
• No supplier price feeds. Your price list holds your own prices, and you update them when the wholesaler's change.
• No separate licence number field on quotes and invoices yet. Add your licence number to the terms and notes.
• Xero only: there is no MYOB or QuickBooks sync.

If your business needs those, look at a bigger field service system; the best apps for Australian trade businesses covers several. If what you want is to know whether each job made money while there is still time to fix it, that is what TrackYaTradie is built for.