Every trade has an unbillable half.

What this was built for

A licensed electrical contractor. Around seven staff. Service and renovation work, not new construction.

The owner priced every job himself. Enquiries arrived by phone, text and email, and somebody had to read each one, work out what the job was, chase the customer for what was missing, price it, send it, follow it up, book a technician, invoice it, then chase the payment.

The usual fix is to hire a coordinator, at somewhere between fifty and sixty-five thousand a year. That works until the volume grows again, and then it is two coordinators.

What was built instead

A system that runs the path from first contact to paid invoice, and involves a person only where judgment is genuinely required.

Intake

Calls, texts, emails and web enquiries land in one place. Each is read and classified into a specific service type automatically, in two languages, including a first read of urgency.

Qualifying

The customer gets one link. It asks only what is still missing for that specific job, usually five to seven questions, and coaches them through the photos that matter. One good photo of an open panel answers four questions that would otherwise cost a phone call or a site visit.

Quoting

Labour comes from hours by job type against a configured rate. Materials come from the inventory ledger with markup applied at quote time. Taxes, margins and validity are set in one place, so a rate change updates every future quote at once.

Scheduling

On approval the job books against real technician availability, with per-technician calendars and travel accounted for.

The field

Technicians work from a mobile app that keeps working with no signal and syncs when it returns. Start and finish times are captured on the job, not remembered afterwards.

Money

The approved quote becomes an invoice in QuickBooks. Payment status flows back automatically, and unpaid invoices escalate on a schedule instead of when somebody remembers.

Around all of it: follow-up on unapproved quotes, review requests after completion, and an error catcher that reports the moment any step fails.

The size of it

• Automated workflows36
• Individual steps within them467
• Web application22,600 lines
• Production databases5
• Service types modelled end to end32
• Build effort~1,200 hours

What took longest, and matters most

Any developer can connect a form to a calendar. The reason this took a year is that the quote has to be right, and in a licensed trade right is a legal question, not a commercial one.

So the regulatory basis was rebuilt from primary sources: the licensing board, the trade corporation, the workplace safety regulator, the utility, and the electrical code itself. Every rule verified against the actual source, with the date it takes effect recorded, because two editions of the code were simultaneously valid during the transition.

Three things surfaced that had nothing to do with software, and every one of them was costing money before anyone went looking.

None of that is visible from the outside. It came out of encoding the rules properly and then checking what the pricing engine actually did with them.

Fire, life safety and electrical service

The trade differs. The shape is identical, and in inspection work it is harder, because the volume is set by legislation rather than by demand:

Cycles

Inspection intervals are set by code, so the volume is neither optional nor seasonal.

Deficiencies

Every inspection produces a list, and every item on it has to be priced. The ones that never get quoted are simply lost revenue.

Lines

Multiple service lines run on different clocks inside the same building.

Portfolio

A property list multiplies every one of the above, and it grows with the customer rather than with the crew.

The work underneath is the same work: read what came in, decide what it is, price it correctly, put the right technician in front of it, invoice it, get paid. The rules constraining the quote are different rules, and encoding them properly is roughly a two-week exercise once the rest exists.

Honest about what this is

This is a live system running a real business, so it is still being worked on. Parts of the money layer are being hardened now. And it is one contractor's system, shaped around how that contractor actually works, rather than packaged for resale.

That is the point. A package would not have caught the permit fee.

How this starts

Not with a build.

It starts with a free half hour, where you walk through how a job travels through your business today and we tell you whether there is anything worth doing.

If there is, the next step is a $500 diagnostic: one week finding where the work actually stalls and what each stall costs over a year, ending in a scope document and a phase plan. It comes off the build if you go ahead, and you keep the document either way.

Phases are quoted after that, and approved one at a time, sequenced so the parts that pay for themselves land first.