ProContact for electricians

A self-employed electrician juggles three kinds of work that have nothing in common: the urgent callout, the planned installation, and the inspection or remedial work. Different lead times, different margins, different clients. Here is how to make ProContact match that.

Create three activities

Under Activities, create:

1. Callouts — today's phone call, settled in one visit.
2. Installation — the planned job, preceded by a quote.
3. Inspection and remedials — the periodic visit, the report, putting it right.

This split is not decoration. Three months in, the Statistics page filtered by activity tells you which of the three actually fills your diary — and it is often not the one you think. Plenty of electricians discover that callouts take half their days for a fraction of the turnover.

The free plan allows two activities: start with Callouts and Installation, add the third later.

The site address is not the billing address

This is the detail that makes an unprepared client file useless. The owner lives elsewhere, the letting agent bills the managing company, your client has you working in a property they rent.

On a contact record, add as many addresses as you need and mark the one that should show by default as main. Same for numbers: the client's mobile, and the caretaker who has the key.

See managing your contacts.

The quote that decides your month

An installation quote is almost never refused. It is forgotten.

The routine that works, three actions after you send it:

1. Create the appointment for the site visit, status Scheduled.
2. Set a reminder at day 2, recipient User, frequency Once. You call while it is still warm.
3. If the client asks for time, set a second reminder for the date they gave. "Call me in September" is information, not a refusal — as long as it is recorded somewhere that will wake you up.

See reminders.

Periodic inspection is free recurring work

The installations you commission today will need looking at again. Inspection rules differ by region and property type — check the one that applies where you work, then set a recurring reminder for the due date, recipient Both.

The client gets the reminder at the same time you do. You are not selling: you are being useful, and you are the one they call.

It is the cheapest order book in existence, and it is already sitting in your client records.

Write down what was decided on site

On a job, everything gets decided out loud, standing up, between two conduits. Three weeks later the client remembers never asking for extra sockets in the garage.

After each visit, write a note on the appointment — four lines is enough — and tick shared with client. They see it in their portal, with the date on it.

That is not paperwork. That is what stops the argument about the invoice.

See notes and the client portal.

Callouts deserve different handling

An emergency has no quote and no follow-up. It has one need: that the client still exists in your records in six months, when something else goes wrong.

Create the contact record on site, before you drive off. Name, mobile, address. Under a minute. Status Active client and activity Callouts is all it needs.

That is the basis for everything else: a well-recorded callout becomes an installation the following year.

In short

Ready to start? See the 10-minute setup.

This guide builds on ProContact for tradespeople, which covers the four problems every trade shares.