Electrician admin automation: EICRs, certificates, evenings

Automate the admin that repeats, in this order. Send: every certificate goes to the customer, the landlord and your job folder the day you test, with the next inspection date logged. Chase: unpaid invoices get reminders on fixed days. Remind: each EICR's due date becomes a message to the landlord before it lapses. Keep the testing, the codes, the signature and the notifiable-work call yourself. No software should touch those.

I'm a plumber by trade, not an electrician, and I build phone and follow-up systems for trade businesses in the UK and US. This one is written for a UK electrician with a van, a certificate app and a kitchen table that turns into an office at nine at night. If you're in the US, swap the EICR for the permit and the inspection sign-off. The order still holds.

Your evenings are four jobs, not one

Admin feels like one lump. It isn't. The NOW Report 2026, a survey of 140 UK tradespeople in June 2026, put quoting, invoicing and chasing payments at five hours and 20 minutes a week, much of it in the evenings or at weekends. It was co-commissioned by Powered Now, which sells software to trades, so weigh that. The number won't surprise anyone who's done an EICR on a Tuesday and typed it up on a Thursday.

Pull that lump apart and there are four separate jobs after every test. I call them sign, send, remind, chase.

1. Sign. The readings, the codes, the observations and your signature.
2. Send. The certificate to whoever ordered the work, the landlord's copy, the job folder, and the scheme notification if the work is notifiable.
3. Remind. The date for the next inspection, printed on the report, turned into a message before it arrives.
4. Chase. The invoice, until it's paid.

The test I use for anything I'd automate, same as in the four automations post: does it follow a pattern, and does it need your judgement? Send, remind and chase follow a pattern. Sign needs you. Quotes are a fifth pile, covered in the quote follow-up post.

Sign stays yours, all of it

This is where I tell you what AI can't do, and here the list is long. It can't take a reading. It can't decide whether an observation is a C2 or a C3. It can't sign anything. The IET's page on certification schemes says the installer should complete the electrical installation certificate and give it to the person ordering the work. The installer. Not the app.

I wouldn't let it write the observations either. If an app offers to turn a voice note into tidy text, that's fine on a job sheet. On an EICR, a sentence you didn't quite say, under your name and your scheme number, is a problem you signed for.

Whether a job is notifiable under Part P is yours too. That's a call made standing in front of the board, not a field on a form.

So write down which parts of your paperwork need your eyes. That list is the part you never automate. Everything after your signature is fair game.

Send first: the certificate out before you leave the drive

Send goes first for three reasons. It happens after every job. It starts legal clocks. And it builds the list that Remind runs on.

You know the clocks. For notifiable work in England, regulation 20 of the Building Regulations 2010 gives whoever did the work 30 days from completion to give the occupier the certificate and tell building control, which in practice means your scheme's portal. GOV.UK tells homeowners that certificate shows up in solicitors' searches when they sell. A notification you forgot turns up years later in somebody's house sale.

Landlords are on a clock too, and it starts with your report. The GOV.UK guidance gives them 28 days after the test to hand the tenant a copy and 28 days to finish any remedial work, and says councils can fine them up to £40,000 for a breach. An agent who gets your report the same day remembers it.

The same rules now cover housing associations and councils. Social tenancies granted before 1 December 2025 must be inspected before 1 November 2026, the guidance says. As I write this, that's a month away. If you do that work, your paperwork is being tested right now.

Here's the send step I'd set up:

1. You finish and sign the certificate in your app. That's the trigger.
2. The PDF goes to whoever ordered the work, and to the landlord or agent if there is one, with a two-line note.
3. A copy lands in the job folder, named by address, certificate type and date.
4. The next inspection date and the landlord's email go into one list.
5. If the work is notifiable, a 30-day timer starts and nags you until you mark it done.
6. The invoice goes out with it. Same day, not Sunday.

Your certificate app may already do step 2, so check its share screen first. If you're still on paper, an app is the cheapest fix in this post: Tradecert, for one, lists £18 a month. Steps 3 to 5 are where a small build sits. If your app emails the PDF, a workflow can pick it up from your inbox, file it, and read the address and the next inspection date off it, much like the invoice filing build. Reading a date off a PDF is one of the few places I'd let AI in. It's reading, not deciding, and you get the list to check.