Electrician pricing: from quote to payment without gaps

Charging for electrical work has a peculiarity you don’t find in other trades: a large part of the job is inspection and documentation, not installing hardware. Testing, putting the paperwork together and the responsibility of your signature all have a cost that doesn’t show up in any fitting.

Below: how to structure pricing that covers both sides.

The three parts of the bill

• Labour: technician hours × hourly rate, with a surcharge for out-of-hours work or difficult access.
• Materials: with a fixed mark-up policy or a price list for the items you fit all the time.
• Technical services: inspection, testing, drawing up the installer’s declaration (in Greece, the YDE), drawings. Charged as a service in its own right, not as a “freebie” thrown in with the installation.

The third part is the one most often given away. A full inspection with testing and paperwork means hours of work, equipment that costs money and has to be calibrated, and personal liability under your signature.

What the quote should say

The customer doesn’t know what an inspection involves. If the quote just says “certificate”, they’ll compare it only on price with the next electrician’s. If it says what’s included, they compare content:

1. Site survey and visual inspection of the installation.
2. Circuit-by-circuit testing with recorded values.
3. Testing of the residual current devices.
4. Drawing up the test report and single-line diagram.
5. Preparing and submitting the paperwork.
6. A copy for the owner’s records.

Expressly excluded: remedial work on any findings. If the inspection turns up a problem, putting it right is a separate job with a separate quote — otherwise you either give it away or end up arguing.

Deposits and stage payments

On jobs with significant materials (board, cabling, light fittings), a deposit isn’t a lack of trust — it funds the materials you’re buying. A scheme that works: 40% deposit for materials, 40% on completion of the works, 20% on handover of the paperwork.

That last 20% matters: it ties payment to the deliverable the customer actually needs.

The cycle that mustn’t break

Quote → acceptance → work → logging materials and hours → billing → invoice → payment. Every time this chain makes you re-enter the same details, a point appears where something will get lost.

In ElectroPro an accepted quote turns into a job, the materials and hours you log on site become charges, and the customer’s balance updates itself. No double entry, no forgotten materials.

What to track every month

• Outstanding quotes and acceptance rate.
• Open balances per customer, sorted by age.
• Average time from completion to payment.
• How many certificates and periodic inspections were done — your most steady source of income.

Conclusion

Charge for documentation the way you charge for installation: it’s work with a cost and a liability. And close the loop all the way to payment inside one system, so you don’t have to remember who owes what and for what.