What electrical software actually has to do
Strip away the marketing and an electrical contractor's software has one job: carry a job from the first phone call to a paid invoice without the work falling into a spreadsheet, a text thread, or someone's memory. In practice that means five things it has to do well. It has to turn a site visit into a professional quote the customer trusts — parts and labor, itemized, with a signature that means yes. It has to schedule the actual work, which for electrical is rarely a single visit: a service upgrade is a permit, a disconnect, an inspection, and a reconnect; new construction is a rough-in weeks before drywall and a finish after. It has to let the crew document the job from a phone — photos of the panel before and after, the inspector's green tag, the concealed runs before the wall closes. It has to keep the crew safe and prove it, because energized work means lockout/tagout and OSHA expects a documented, acknowledged hazard analysis. And it has to bill — fixed-price for the quoted panel swap, time-and-materials for the troubleshooting call.
If a tool does four of those five and forces you into a second app for the fifth, you are back to the app-juggling that made you go shopping in the first place. The goal is one place where the quote, the schedule, the photos, the JSA, and the invoice all hang off the same job.
The decision criteria that matter for electrical
Every field-service tool claims scheduling, quoting, and invoicing. The criteria that actually separate a good fit from a bad one for an electrical shop are the ones the generic demo skips. Weight these by your own job mix — a service-heavy shop cares most about dispatch and mobile invoicing; a project-heavy shop lives and dies by phasing and inspections — but every electrical contractor should score a tool on all four.
- Permit and inspection workflow. Nearly every electrical job of size has a permit number, an inspection date, and a sign-off that gates the next phase — you cannot close the wall until rough-in passes. A tool that treats these as scheduled job events with reminders and photo attachments (the green tag) keeps the crew from getting ahead of the inspector. A tool that leaves permits in your email is a tool that will eventually idle a crew.
- JSA and lockout/tagout. OSHA 1910.147 expects LOTO before energized work, and a documented hazard analysis the crew acknowledged. The right tool turns LOTO into a reusable JSA template the crew signs from a phone before the job starts — with a name, timestamp, and location on each signature — not a verbal check nobody can prove happened.
- Flexible billing (T&M and fixed-price). Electrical work is genuinely both: the panel upgrade is a fixed bid, the intermittent-fault troubleshooting call is time-and-materials. A tool that only does flat-rate service tickets, or only does fixed quotes, will force you to invoice half your work somewhere else. Insist on both, from the same job record.
- Scheduling that understands phases and crews. A service tool schedules one tech into one appointment slot. Electrical project work needs rough-in, inspection, and finish as separate crew assignments — often weeks apart — with the ability to reschedule when the GC's drywall slips without blowing up the rest of your calendar.
Where Vexor fits — and where it doesn't
Here is the honest placement. Vexor is built for crews running real electrical jobs, not solo service techs. It models a job as phases — rough-in, inspection, finish — each with its own crew assignment and progress that rolls up to the whole job. Permits and inspections are tracked as scheduled job events, with the inspector's green tag photographed and attached. Quotes are line-item parts-and-labor with e-signature that auto-creates the job on acceptance, and Vexor bills both fixed-price and time-and-materials. Photos tag by category (Pre-existing, Rough-in, Pre-Inspection, Final, Issue) so a callback two years later has a searchable record. The GPS time clock separates drive time from on-site time and applies OT rules by state.
Where Vexor is not the answer: it is not a CAD or takeoff tool — it will not auto-count devices or generate drawings from a plan, so you enter the takeoff as line items (your own templates for common jobs) and Vexor organizes the estimate around it. It does not generate certified-payroll reports for prevailing-wage jobs — it captures clean hours you export to a certified-payroll tool. It does not file permits or integrate with a specific municipal portal; it keeps your record straight. And heavy-commercial project management with AIA billing and RFIs is Procore's lane, not Vexor's. Say yes to Vexor for residential and light-commercial crew work; reach for a specialist tool for the enterprise-commercial and prevailing-wage edges.
In Vexor
Vexor covers the four electrical criteria in one place: phased scheduling (rough-in / inspection / finish as separate crew assignments), permit and inspection tracking as job events with green-tag photos, a JSA/LOTO template the crew signs from a phone with a full audit trail, and both fixed-price and T&M billing from the same job. Pricing is flat — $99/mo Field or $199/mo Operations — with unlimited electricians and unlimited subcontractor portals on both.
Red flags that cost electrical contractors money
The most expensive mistakes in this category are structural, not feature gaps — they are the pricing model and the product's underlying shape. Watch for these four before you sign anything.
- Per-seat pricing. Software priced per user ties your bill to headcount. Hire a fifth electrician and you jump a tier for software you were already running. For crew-based work, flat per-workspace pricing where field crew and subs are unlimited is almost always cheaper as you grow — you pay for the office, not the truck.
- Quote-only tiers. When the real price is hidden behind a mandatory sales call and a demo, it usually means the number is high and negotiated per-tech. ServiceTitan and FieldEdge sit here — typically hundreds of dollars per tech per month once you see the quote. Transparent published pricing is a signal the tool is priced for your size, not an enterprise's.
- Weeks-long paid onboarding. If a tool needs a multi-week implementation and an onboarding fee before it does anything useful, that cost is real and the switching pain is worse. A tool a foreman can be productive in the same week respects that you are running a business, not a software project.
- Service-only tools sold to project trades. This is the subtle one. A one-tech-one-call-one-invoice architecture cannot cleanly show a job with a rough-in, an inspection three weeks later, and a finish. If the demo can't put a multi-phase job with an inspection in the middle on the screen, it is a service tool wearing a project trade's clothes — and you will fight it forever.
Running the numbers honestly
Do the pricing math on the crew you will have in a year, not the crew you have today, and price the whole stack — not the headline plan. A common electrical setup is a service-dispatch tool plus a separate photo app (CompanyCam runs ~$19–24 per user per month) plus a spreadsheet doing the scheduling. On a per-seat dispatch tool, an eight-electrician shop is paying for eight seats before the photo app is even added. Add it up at your real headcount and compare it against a flat plan.
For reference points contractors actually shop against: Housecall Pro's Basic tier is public at roughly $59/mo but is service-shaped and tiers up quickly; Jobber runs roughly $39–599/mo across tiers, again per the plan and users; ServiceTitan and FieldEdge are quote-only and typically land in the hundreds of dollars per tech per month; JobTread is around $199/mo for three users. Against those, Vexor's flat $99 (Field) or $199 (Operations) with unlimited electricians and unlimited sub portals changes the math the most for a growing crew — the fifth and sixth electrician cost nothing more in software. Run your own stack total minus the plan you would actually use; the honest number is what should decide it.
In Vexor
On Vexor, adding electricians and subcontractors never changes the bill — both paid plans include unlimited office users, unlimited field crew, and unlimited limited-scope subcontractor portals. A solo electrician and an eight-crew shop pay the same $99 or $199 a month, so the pricing math gets better as you grow, not worse.
Step by step
- 1
Map your job mix first
Write down roughly what share of your revenue is service calls versus phased project work (rough-in/finish, TI, service upgrades). This decides which criteria you weight — dispatch and mobile invoicing for service-heavy, phased scheduling and permit/inspection tracking for project-heavy.
- 2
List your must-do jobs, not features
Name the two or three real jobs the tool has to survive — e.g. a $4k panel upgrade with a permit, a new-construction rough-in-to-finish, a T&M troubleshooting call. You will test against these, not a feature checklist.
- 3
Verify the four electrical non-negotiables
Confirm each tool handles phased scheduling, permit/inspection tracking as job events, JSA/LOTO with mobile crew sign-off, and both fixed-price and time-and-materials billing. If any of the four is missing or bolted-on, note it.
- 4
Do the pricing math on your real headcount
Price the tool at the crew size you will have in a year, not today. Multiply per-seat plans out and add any separate photo app; flag any tool that hides the price behind a sales call or puts portals, sync, or AI behind a surprise tier.
- 5
Screen for red flags
Reject or discount tools with per-seat pricing, quote-only tiers, weeks-long paid onboarding, or a service-only architecture that can't cleanly show a multi-phase job with an inspection in the middle.
- 6
Run one real job through the trial
Use a free trial to quote, schedule across phases, capture a JSA signature and a permit/inspection, and invoice — end to end, on a phone, with your own worst job. The tool that survives your reality wins.