Electrical contracting · Domestic and commercial
Count the points. That is a thing a photograph is actually good at.
A board change, a rewire, a kitchen refit, a floor of small power and data. You price it by the point, the circuit and the fix, and counting is the one measurement a photograph gives up reliably. Talk the job through or photograph it, and the scope comes back with the counts graded high confidence and the guesses marked as guesses.
No card. Three takeoffs on the free plan, enough to run a rewire you have already quoted and check the count against yours.
How the job reaches you
Two doors, and you use both in the same week.
On domestic work there is no document. You walk it, you count, and you price it in the van or at nine o'clock that night. On commercial work there is an electrical layout, a small power and data drawing, or a specification, and a return date.
BuiltUp takes both. Dictate the walk round and it transcribes it. Photograph the job and it counts what is in the frame. Upload the layout and it reads it. All three land in the same estimate, priced against your own material catalogue and your own day rate, split into first fix, second fix and testing.
Talk it through, or photograph it
Audio is transcribed, so a walk round narrated into a phone becomes a written brief without you typing it. Photographs go in up to 24 a run. On a commercial job upload the electrical layout as a PDF instead and it is read as a drawing, with the scaled geometry used where the drawing carries it.
Counts come back high confidence
Sockets, switches, fused spurs, shaver points, light fittings, ceiling roses and alarms all get counted, and the photo mode is explicit that counting is reliable and should be graded HIGH. Compare that with a decorator asking for wall areas, where the same photograph gives almost nothing. The trade decides what the picture is worth, and for you it is worth a lot.
It writes the works list, not a wish list
Every item it notes in a photograph observation has to reappear as its own priced row, and every priced row has to trace back to something it described. Observations are the evidence; the works list is the orderable schedule. An analysis with observations and an empty works list is treated as a failed analysis rather than shipped to you as a summary.
First fix, second fix, testing, priced separately
The electrical walk splits the work the way you invoice it. Labour is stored as a day rate and a lump sum returned by the model is converted into the days that money buys, so you can hold it against how long the second fix will actually take with two of you on site.
Your own catalogue rather than a national average: the manufacturer's own part name, your price, your SKU. Priced off this, a second-fix schedule adds up to what your wholesaler actually charges you.
The electrical walk, item by item.
This is the category list it works through on a residential or mixed job. On commercial and office work it runs the commercial electrical walk instead, and picks up workstation positions and the small power and data drops they imply.
- Consumer unit, new, replacement or upgrade
- Sockets, switches, fused spurs and shaver points, counted by type
- Lighting points by type: downlight, pendant, wall light, external, LED strip
- Cooker point, hob point, oven circuit
- Smoke, heat and CO alarms, mains-interlinked, counted per BS 5839-6
- EV charge point, external supply, garden or garage sub-main
- Data, TV and doorbell points
- First fix, second fix, testing and Part P certification as priced items
- Renew socket, switch, light fitting or ceiling rose on reactive work
- EICR remedials. Each observed C1, C2 and C3 listed separately
- Fire alarm coverage to L1 to L5 where a commercial spec notes it
- Compartmentation and fire stopping to penetrations
- Isolate electrics as a make-safe item on an emergency call
- Access equipment and its duration, and tip runs by load
On social housing work each row opens with EMERGENCY, URGENT or ROUTINE, because a repair line without a priority is not something a supervisor can raise a works order from.
The three that matter with a board in front of you.
Chosen for this trade. Everything else the product does is on the features page.
- Scan the barcode at the wholesaler
- Scan a product and it is looked up against your own supplier catalogue first, then against a global barcode database as a fallback, and dropped into the estimate with its price. No part numbers typed in a car park, and no pricing cable from memory.
- Import the wholesaler's price list from the PDF they emailed
- Every parsed row is shown to you before anything is saved, each carrying high, medium or low confidence with the raw source line and page number it came from. A row where the price cannot be read blocks the import rather than being entered as a guess, because a wrong price becomes a rate on an estimate and then a number in front of a client. A scanned or photographed list is refused with an explanation rather than half-read.
- An electrician's day rate, by region
- Electrician ships as one of 27 UK trades with a low, mid and high day rate across twelve regions, sourced from published trade averages, Spon's and BCIS location factors. Load it, then overwrite it with what you actually charge. Your own stated rate always beats the model's figure.
What it will not do for you.
- It does not issue or hold certificates.
- There is no EIC, EICR, minor works certificate or Part P notification in BuiltUp, and no test-result register. Certification is priced as a line on the estimate; the certificate itself lives in whatever you use now, and the PDF can be filed against the project. The old version of this page claimed a compliance trail it did not have, and that has been taken down rather than quietly reworded.
- There is no jobbing diary.
- The programme is per project, tasks by trade with dates, a progress percentage and a timeline. It is not a week view of every call-out across twelve customers, and it will not stop you double-booking a Tuesday.
- It does not do design.
- No cable calculations, no volt-drop, no discrimination study, no load assessment. It prices the work described. Anything requiring a design decision comes back as an open question.
- It cannot see behind a wall or under a floor.
- Where the evidence suggests a defect whose extent is hidden it raises the investigation as an open question rather than pricing it. On a rewire that is the difference between a quote you can stand behind and one you will be arguing about in week two.
Questions this comes with.
- I quote on site or I lose the job. Is this fast enough for that?
- The honest answer is that it depends on the run and we are not going to print a number we have not measured. What it does remove is the evening: the transcription, the writing-up, the looking-up of prices and the typing of a document. Try it on a job you have already quoted and time it yourself. That is a better answer than one we could give you.
- Estimate or quote?
- They are not the same and the distinction is legal. What BuiltUp produces first is an estimate. A document to check. You turn it into a quote, which is fixed, once you have read the low-confidence rows and the open questions. Nothing should go to a client unread, and the product is built to make reading it a ten-minute job rather than a re-do.
- Does it work for commercial as well as domestic?
- Yes, and it runs a different walk for each. Pick office or commercial fit-out and it reads the set-out plan, the door schedule and the reflected ceiling plan, splits CAT A from CAT B where the drawings imply it, and counts workstation positions with the small power and data drops they imply. Pick residential and it runs the domestic electrical walk above.
Run a rewire you have already quoted.
Your count exists. Put it next to the one that comes back and see where the two differ.
No card. Three takeoffs and three AI estimates, both lifetime totals.
Or set it up with us, 30 minutes, screen-shared