Trade
Operations Systems for Electrical Contractors
Change orders agreed to in the field and never written down. Material picked up on a company card that never makes it onto the job cost. The work gets done. The billing and the margin are where it leaks.
What we usually build
Where the money leaks in your trade
→ The ticket-to-invoice path, so every service call and change order gets billed
→ Material put against the job while the crew is still on it
→ Change orders captured in the field with the approval attached
→ Job costing that shows margin before the job closes, not after
We build the path from the field ticket to the invoice, and we put material against the job in real time, so the margin you earned is the margin you keep.
What we find
What an electrical operation looks like before we build
Names changed, but this is a real electrical contractor we are working with right now. None of it was on fire. All of it was quietly costing money, and it is the pattern almost every crew-based electrical operation shows once you look.
→ Payroll ran as a weekly lump sum, cut as checks with no wages tied to jobs or cost codes. Every job was flying blind on its biggest number, labor.
→ Workers comp and burden were never built into the loaded rate, so bids looked profitable on paper and lost money in the field, and no one could see it until the year closed.
→ The spread between the best job and the worst job was buried inside an average. The average looked fine. One job was carrying the other.
→ Estimates went out without material quotes tied to the bid, so every price change and every field change order quietly ate the margin.
→ Contract risk, including liquidated-damages language, sat unreviewed until it became a problem instead of a line item.
We do not guess at any of this. We rebuild the real loaded labor rate from the payroll register and the workers comp declaration, then test it against a handful of their own closed jobs. The finding is not the average. It is the gap between their best job and their worst, in their own numbers.
When the numbers are clean
A fundable operation is worth more than a busy one
Once job costing and the real margins are in place, something else opens up. The operation becomes fundable. The same electrical contractor is working toward a property purchase and a working-capital line, and clean books are exactly what a lender wants to see. We help package and prepare that loan the way a CFO would, sourcing and organizing what a lender needs and presenting the numbers the way banks expect to see them. That is advisory and package preparation, not lending, and not legal or financial advice.
Would it be a bad idea to spend 30 minutes on this?
The fit call is free. If off-the-shelf software is the right answer for you, we will say so.