Judge it on certificates before you judge it on anything else. A NZ electrician's job software has to produce a Certificate of Compliance and an Electrical Safety Certificate on the phone, attach both to the job, and hand them back three years later. Tradify and Fergus ship NZ certificate templates. ServiceM8 is priced for high call-out volume. Everything else is secondary.
The certificate is part of the job, not the tidy-up
Every trade has paperwork. An electrician's paperwork is load-bearing, because the law says the work is finished when the certificate is issued, not when the switchboard is closed. Regulation 65 of the Electricity (Safety) Regulations 2010 requires a Certificate of Compliance for all general-risk and high-risk prescribed electrical work, and a Record of Inspection on top of that for high-risk work. Regulation 74A adds the Electrical Safety Certificate for prescribed electrical work connected to a supply.
Regulation 74A gives you 20 working days from connection to produce the Electrical Safety Certificate, and the Electrical Workers Registration Board spells out which of the three documents each risk level needs. That deadline is the reason certificate handling belongs in the same place as the job, and not in a glovebox.
A second reason shows up years later. A customer sells the house, the buyer's lawyer asks for the paperwork on the 2024 rewire, and you have twenty minutes to find a form you filled in on a wet Thursday. If the certificate lives on the job record, that is a search. If it lives in a photo roll, it is an afternoon.
What each tool does with a certificate
This is where the four NZ options separate, and it has little to do with the feature grids on their websites.
| Tool | Certificate handling | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|
| Tradify | NZ electrical forms built in: Certificate of Compliance, Electrical Safety Certificate and Certificate of Verification templates, signed and sent from the app | Per-user pricing, so the bill tracks head count rather than job count |
| Fergus | A certifications module holding compliance certificates, gas certificates and producer statements against the job | Over 100 supplier price books, which suits a wholesaler-heavy materials list |
| ServiceM8 | A general forms engine; the Certificate of Compliance exists as a form you load in rather than a template that ships with it | Priced by monthly job count with unlimited users, which fits call-out work |
| simPRO | Asset registers and a maintenance planner, aimed at recurring test-and-tag and switchboard schedules | Quote only, no published price, and heavier than a domestic crew needs |
Tradify publishes its NZ forms and certificates as a named feature, and Fergus documents its certificates module the same way. ServiceM8 will do the job with a loaded form, and plenty of sparkies run it like that, but you are assembling the template rather than opening it.
Call-out volume decides the pricing model
Domestic and light commercial electrical work is high-count and low-duration. Three or four jobs a tech a day is ordinary. That job count, more than crew size, is what makes one pricing model cheaper than another.
Tradify charges per user, from $48 a user a month on Lite, so two sparkies cost the same whether they run 40 jobs a month or 400. ServiceM8 charges by monthly job count with unlimited seats, so a two-person shop clearing 500 jobs a month lands on a higher tier than a five-person shop clearing 300. The full tier maths for both is in ServiceM8 or Tradify, and the tier-by-tier detail sits in the Tradify pricing post.
Count your jobs before you shop. Pull last month's invoice list, count the lines, and you have the number that decides this. Most people guess low.
The hours a certificate habit costs you
Worked example, a two-electrician shop doing domestic and light commercial, both certifying.
- Nine certified jobs a week between them.
- On paper the certificate cycle runs about 12 minutes a job: fill the form on site, photograph it, email it that night, file the copy. Nine jobs at 12 minutes is 108 minutes.
- About one in six comes back needing something fixed or reissued, at 15 minutes each. That is 1.5 jobs at 15 minutes, another 23 minutes.
- 108 plus 23 is 131 minutes a week, or 2.2 hours.
- Across 46 working weeks, 2.2 hours a week is 100 hours a year on certificates alone.
Now price the fix. Two Tradify Lite seats at $48 a user a month is $96 a month, or $1,152 a year. If digital certificates halve those 100 hours, the subscription buys back 50 hours for $1,152, about $23 an hour. If it cuts two thirds, which is what happens once customer and site details prefill from the job record, you are buying back 67 hours for the same $1,152, about $17 an hour. Both figures sit well under what an electrician's hour earns on the tools.
Run your own version of that sum in the automation ROI calculator, which does the hours-to-dollars conversion and the payback period for you.
New-build subcontract work changes the answer
A lot of Canterbury electricians split their week between their own call-outs and rough-in work for a builder. Those two halves want opposite things from software.
Your own call-outs want speed: quote, do, certify, invoice, same day. The builder's site wants patience. You are on someone else's programme, you claim progressively across rough-in and fit-off, your invoice sits inside a head contractor's payment cycle, and a slice of it is held as retention until practical completion. A tool built around one-visit jobs will handle the first half and lose money on the second, because nothing in it connects a claim you sent in March to a retention released in November.
If more than about a third of your revenue comes through head contractors, read the builders' version of this post before you choose, because the progress-claim and retention machinery described there is the machinery you are plugged into.
When you do not need software at all
A solo electrician doing under about fifteen certified jobs a month, invoicing through Xero, does not need a job management subscription to be compliant. WorkSafe publishes free certification and record of inspection templates, and a dated folder structure plus a phone scanner meets the legal test. You will lose a few minutes a job to retyping customer details, and at that volume a few minutes a job is cheaper than $576 a year.
The point where that stops being true is the second person. Once someone else issues certificates under your supervision, you need to see their work without asking for it, and a shared job record is the cheapest way to get that. The other exit runs the opposite direction: if your real problem is invoicing admin rather than field paperwork, start with what automating invoicing costs, because part of that fixes for nothing.
Pick it in one sitting
Count last month's jobs, decide whether certificate templates matter more to you than supplier price books, then take one 14-day trial and put a real week through it, certificates included. If you want a second opinion on the shortlist before you commit, book a free 30-minute call, or compare the wider field first in the four-way NZ roundup.