Three messages every electrician knows: what's the address? Is job 12 finished? Where are your hours?
That's exactly how our new video opens — with a technician sitting at his workbench, staring at his phone. Not because he doesn't want to work, but because three times a day he has to answer things that should have been written down somewhere long ago.
Over the past months we have built a solution that starts right there: 1Tool for electrical contractors.
Why electrical work in particular
Trades businesses have been working with 1Tool for years. Plumbers, carpenters, construction firms. The basic logic — customers, jobs, appointments, time tracking, invoice — is the same everywhere.
But electrical contractors carry something most industries don't have to this extent: proof obligations.
Every test, every report, every approval, every photo of a fuse box can become relevant years later. And the workload isn't shrinking: EV charging stations, photovoltaics, batteries, heat pumps. More jobs, more documentation, the same number of people.
Solve that with notes, WhatsApp and a folder on the office PC and you don't lose the time on site. You lose it afterwards.
The problem sits between the site and the office
In almost every business I look at, the work itself isn't the problem. The people are good. The problem is the handover.
The technician knows what he did. The office knows two days later. The hours arrive on a slip of paper on Friday evening. The photo of the finished distribution board is on a private phone. The material list is on the back of a delivery note.
And then somebody sits in the office at the end of the month reconstructing what actually happened. That isn't administration, that's archaeology.
What the technician has on his phone
The app is deliberately plain: home, appointments, customers, jobs, documents. Nothing more is needed out on site.
The job overview shows at a glance what is planned, what is in progress, what has been completed and what has been put on hold. Below it, the current job with address, appointment, technician and priority — modernising a fuse box, installing an EV charging point, lighting, safety inspection, socket repair.
No callback needed. The address is in the job, not in a chat history.
Why documents are the real bottleneck
The part I cared about most is the unspectacular one: the document area.
Invoices, approvals, site photos, checklists, signed forms — all attached to the job, not buried in an inbox. The technician uploads the photo directly from the site, the test report sits with the right customer, the service report is where the colleague who drives out for maintenance in two years will actually find it.
That sounds trivial. In practice it decides whether a complaint costs twenty minutes or two days.
What happens in the office
Everything captured on the phone is instantly there in the office. No export, no retyping, no second version of the truth.
In the dashboard, management sees revenue, outstanding items and utilisation. The completed job becomes the invoice — with the hours the technician recorded and the material actually installed. And once it's paid, you see that where you go looking for it, instead of in a bank statement.
That's the real point: not an app for technicians and a separate piece of software for the office, but one system with two views.
Not another isolated tool
The most common setup in businesses of this size is five tools that don't know each other: one for quotes, one for time tracking, one for invoices, WhatsApp for everything else and Excel for the rest.
Each one works on its own. Together they form a system in which nobody knows which number is correct anymore.
1Tool is built as one piece of software with more than 30 modules. The job knows the customer, the time tracking knows the job, the invoice knows both. So nothing has to be reconciled — there is nothing to reconcile.
Who this actually pays off for
Honestly: not for everyone.
If you work alone and have two jobs a week, you don't need software, you need a decent calendar.
It gets interesting from the point where more than one person is out on the road and somebody in the office can no longer keep track of who is where. In my experience that line sits at three to five technicians — and from there the problem grows with every additional employee, not shrinks.
What comes next
My conviction: the biggest lever in the trades isn't the faster invoice, it's documentation that comes into existence without anyone writing it.
A photo, a few words dictated, a finished service report. A test report that fills itself in because the system knows which installation was checked. That's what we're working on right now — and it's the part where AI actually changes something in the trades instead of just producing marketing copy.
One thing is non-negotiable in all of it: the company's data stays the company's data.
Have a look
The video shows you in 43 seconds what this is about — from a technician with three open questions to a paid invoice.
If you run an electrical contracting business and want to know whether this fits your workflow: there is a free demo in which we look at your actual process instead of showing you a slide deck.
Everything about it at https://www.1tool.com