Scheduling and invoicing for a small electrical contractor

An electrical schedule has to hold two kinds of work at once and show who is where. A contractor’s week mixes short service calls (a dead circuit, a breaker that keeps tripping, a fixture) with installs that take a day or more and sometimes wait on a permit or an inspection, and a two-hour call can’t go to an electrician who is halfway through a panel swap.

The waits are where the calls fit. While an install waits on equipment, the permit or the inspector, the electrician on it is free for service calls, so the installs and the calls belong on the same rows of the same schedule.

Put each job on the schedule with its time window and how long it should take, and assign it to an electrician with dispatch. For an install that spans several visits, schedule each visit as it’s confirmed, including the return trip after inspection. Business Genie’s route optimization orders each electrician’s day automatically, splits jobs across electricians, and re-routes the day when a new call is added.

A panel upgrade or an EV charger install needs a written price before you order the equipment. Send an estimate with a deposit; the balance goes on the invoice when the work is done. See estimates and proposals.

GPS time tracking records each electrician’s hours from the app. Job costing shows whether a job made money once its labor and materials are counted, which is how you find out that a fixed price on a type of install is too low.

Price an install on the visits you schedule for it, and the two can be checked against each other: when the hours tracked on a job keep running past its windows, the price for that kind of install is the thing to change.