Job Management Software for UK Electricians: Tradify, Simpro and Friends

Most UK electrical firms under about ten staff are best served by Tradify or Powered Now, and most firms above that size should be shortlisting Simpro. That one sentence settles the question for the majority of sparkies reading this, because the UK market has quietly sorted itself: Tradify owns the one-to-three-van domestic and light commercial segment, Powered Now wins where built-in UK certificates matter most, Fergus earns its place with owners who obsess over job profitability, and Simpro takes over once you have office staff, commercial projects, and stock to manage.

The harder question is what the software should actually do for you, and most buying guides skip it. A job management platform earns its monthly fee in three places: quotes that go out the same day instead of Sunday night, certificates that leave site with the electrician instead of being chased for a week, and a record of where every job came from, the raw material for every marketing decision you'll ever make. Get those three right and the rest of the feature list is decoration.

What job management software replaces

Job management software replaces the pile: the carbon-copy quote pad, the WhatsApp thread that doubles as a schedule, the shoebox of certificates, and the two hours of invoicing every Sunday evening. For a typical two-van firm that pile costs somewhere between five and ten owner-hours a week, hours billed at £0 while the tools sit in the van.

The measurable wins are mundane and they compound. Quotes sent from the driveway convert better than quotes sent three days later, because the customer is still warm and hasn't rung two competitors in the meantime. Invoices raised the day the job finishes get paid weeks faster than invoices raised at month end. And every job logged with a customer, an address, a value, and a source becomes a data point you can act on. More on that below, because it's the part almost every electrician ignores at purchase and regrets at renewal.

One boundary worth drawing early: this guide covers the platforms that dominate the UK market. If you're weighing the big North American systems, or you want the general framework for choosing, we've covered Jobber vs ServiceTitan and the wider electrician CRM comparison separately.

The features that decide it

Three capabilities separate software that pays for itself from software that becomes an expensive address book: quoting speed, certificate handling, and automated review requests. Everything else (scheduling, invoicing, Xero sync) is table stakes that every platform on this page does adequately.

• Quoting speed. The test is simple: can your least techy electrician build and send a priced, professional quote from a phone, on site, in under ten minutes? Price lists and quote templates matter more than any other feature, because the firm that quotes first wins a disproportionate share of domestic work. If a platform makes quoting slower than your current process, walk away regardless of what else it does.
• Certificates. UK electrical work runs on paperwork (EICs, EICRs, minor works certificates), and a platform that ignores this forces you into a second app and double data entry. Some platforms build UK certificates in, some integrate with dedicated certificate apps, and some pretend the problem does not exist. Know which before you sign.
• Review requests. An automatic message when the invoice goes out (thanks for the business, here's the link to leave us a Google review) turns every completed job into a marketing asset. Firms that automate this collect reviews at several times the rate of firms that rely on remembering to ask, and reviews are the currency of local search. Our Google reviews guide covers what to do with them once they arrive.
• Payment collection. Card payment on site or a pay-now link on the invoice. Every day an invoice ages costs you chasing time, and domestic customers settle small invoices instantly when it takes one tap.
• A job-source field. The unglamorous one. If the platform can record where each job came from (Google, recommendation, Checkatrade, repeat customer) and report revenue by that field, your marketing budget stops being guesswork. If it cannot, everything you spend on marketing will be judged on gut feel.

Tradify: the small-firm favourite

Tradify is the default choice for UK electrical firms with one to ten users, and it earned that position by being genuinely easy to run from a phone. Quoting, scheduling, job tracking, invoicing, and Xero or QuickBooks sync all work the way a sparky expects on the first afternoon, which is why it spreads by word of mouth at the wholesaler counter. Timesheets and basic job costing are in the box, and the quote-to-invoice flow is about as fast as this category gets.

Its limits show at the edges. Certificates are handled through integrations and form add-ons rather than natively, so most Tradify firms run a dedicated certificate app alongside it. Project work (staged valuations, retentions, proper WIP reporting) is thin, because Tradify is built for service and small-works firms and says so. Pricing is per user, roughly £25 to £45 per user per month depending on plan, which stays cheap at three users and starts to invite comparison shopping around eight. For the firm it targets, it's the safest recommendation on this page.

Simpro: for contractors with an office

Simpro is what UK electrical contractors graduate to when the spreadsheet finally breaks, typically somewhere past ten staff, when commercial projects, stock control, and maintenance contracts enter the picture. It handles estimating from supplier catalogue pricing, multi-stage projects with claims and retentions, planned maintenance schedules, and stock across vans and stores. That depth is real, and the bigger firms that run it well would never go back.

The cost of that depth is weight. Simpro is sold and priced by quote, and you should budget several hundred pounds a month once you have a handful of licences, plus an implementation fee and genuinely serious setup time, weeks of building price lists, templates, and workflows before it starts paying you back. Firms under about ten users who buy Simpro for where they hope to be in three years usually end up paying enterprise money to use a tenth of the system. Buy it when the pain it solves has actually arrived, and put a named person in charge of the rollout.

Fergus and Powered Now: the other two worth shortlisting

Fergus and Powered Now each beat the big two on one specific axis, and if that axis is your priority they deserve the trial. Neither has the UK market share of Tradify or the depth of Simpro, and both are established enough that betting a business on them is reasonable.

Fergus: for owners who watch job profit

Fergus is built around a status-board view of every live job and, more distinctively, back-costing, which shows what each job actually made once labour and materials are counted, without an accountant's help. For an electrical firm of roughly two to fifteen people that suspects some job types are quietly losing money, that visibility is the whole pitch. Per-user pricing sits in the low tens of pounds per month. The trade-off is a smaller UK footprint, so local peer support and UK-specific polish lag Tradify, and certificates need a companion app.

Powered Now: UK-built, certificates included

Powered Now is the UK-native option, and its headline advantage is that electrical certificates and industry forms ship inside the product, so an electrician can complete the certificate on the same device, on the same job record, as the quote and the invoice. For a domestic and landlord-focused firm doing steady inspection and remedial work, collapsing two apps into one is a real saving in admin and missed paperwork. Pricing runs roughly £15 to £40 per user per month by tier. The ecosystem around it is smaller (fewer integrations, fewer third-party add-ons), so firms with more complex accounting or stock needs should test their exact workflow in the trial rather than assume.

Certificate apps: the parallel decision

Unless you choose a platform with certificates built in, you will also be choosing a dedicated electrical certification app, and it deserves the same scrutiny. These apps do one job: produce compliant BS 7671 certificates (EICs, EICRs, minor works) on a phone or tablet, with your logo, signatures, and a sane filing system. The good ones cost a few pounds to a few tens of pounds per user per month and pay for themselves the first time a landlord asks for a copy of a two-year-old EICR and you find it in eight seconds.

Two selection rules. First, the app must match the certificates your scheme provider expects, so NICEIC and NAPIT members should confirm the output format is accepted before committing. Second, check whether it talks to your job management platform, even if only by attaching the finished PDF to the job record automatically. Double-keying customer details into two apps on every job is the kind of friction that makes electricians abandon software entirely.

If EICRs are a meaningful slice of your revenue, the software is only half the story. Our EICR marketing guide covers how to turn certificate work into a recurring landlord book rather than a stream of one-off jobs.

What it all costs

Budget roughly £30 to £50 per office-and-field user per month for a small-firm platform, and several hundred pounds a month plus implementation for Simpro-class software. Prices move often and every vendor discounts annual billing, so treat the figures below as orientation for your shortlist rather than gospel. The free trials are where the real evaluation happens.

One costing habit worth keeping: divide the annual software bill by the hours of admin it removes. A £1,500-a-year Tradify subscription that hands an owner back five hours a week costs about £6 per recovered hour. Those hours can go on the tools at £50-plus or into the marketing work that actually grows the firm. Software that clears that bar is cheap at twice the price; software nobody in the firm opens is expensive at any price.

How job software feeds your marketing

A properly configured job management platform is the best marketing measurement tool an electrical firm owns, because it holds the one number no analytics dashboard has: what each job was worth. Google Analytics can tell you a visitor arrived from a Checkatrade profile or a Google ad. Only your job software knows that visitor became a £4,200 consumer unit and partial rewire customer. Connect the two and marketing spend stops being an act of faith.

The setup takes an afternoon and three decisions.

1. Make the job-source field mandatory. Every platform on this page can record where a job came from; almost no firm enforces it. Fix the list of options (Google search, Google ad, recommendation, Checkatrade, repeat customer, landlord or agent) and make whoever books the job pick one before the job can be saved. Six months of that discipline answers questions most firms argue about forever.
2. Automate the two follow-ups. A review request when the invoice goes out, and a quote chase two or three days after every unanswered quote. Both are one-time setups in most platforms, and unanswered quotes are where small firms bleed the most winnable revenue, and our quote follow-up guide has the exact sequences and wording.
3. Run the source report quarterly. Revenue by source, jobs by source, average job value by source. The results are routinely humbling: firms discover the directory they pay £150 a month feeds them £900 of low-margin work a quarter while recommendations quietly deliver the £3,000 jobs. That report is what tells you where next year's budget goes.

Done fully, this joins up with call tracking and website analytics into genuine closed-loop attribution, every pound of marketing spend traced through to invoiced work. That end-to-end wiring is its own project, and it's exactly what our attribution service builds for the firms we work with.

Choosing and switching without losing a fortnight

Pick by running one real week of jobs through a free trial, with the people who will actually use it. Every platform here offers a trial of around two weeks; the mistake is letting the owner click around alone on a quiet evening and call it evaluated. Put a real quote, a real job, a real certificate, and a real invoice through the system, on the phones your electricians carry, and the winner usually announces itself by Thursday.

• Migrate customers and the price list only. Historic jobs and old invoices can stay in the old system or a spreadsheet export. Firms that try to migrate five years of history stall for months; firms that start clean with a customer list and a price book are live within a week.
• Build the price book before go-live. A quoting tool with no prices in it is slower than the quote pad. Load your fifty most common line items first, and the long tail can follow. If the pricing itself needs work before it goes in the system, sort that out with our price book guide first.
• Appoint one owner of the system. Someone decides how jobs are named, when statuses change, and who chases the empty source fields. Software adopted by committee gets abandoned by committee.
• Switch on the automations in week one. Review request and quote follow-up, before old habits settle in. Retrofitting discipline is far harder than starting with it.

The pattern across UK trade firms is consistent: the software choice matters less than the configuration. A well-run Tradify beats a neglected Simpro every month of the year. Choose the platform that fits your size today, wire in the certificates, the follow-ups, and the source tracking. In six months you will run a firm that knows its numbers, which puts you ahead of most of the electricians you price against.