Job management software for UK electricians

Short answer. If you want to produce your own certificates on site, ServiceM8 costs £59 a month, not £25. Building your own Forms and Certificates switches on at the Growing plan. The Free and Starter plans cannot do it. That one gate decides your plan before job counts get a look in, and ServiceM8's own page for electricians does not mention it anywhere.

Where I stand, because you should know before you read on. I set ServiceM8 up for a living, certified by them and listed in their Partner Directory. I do not resell licences, so you buy your subscription direct at the same price whoever you spoke to. ServiceM8 does pay its partners a share on clients they bring in, so I am not neutral. My fee is the same whichever plan you land on, so I have no reason to talk you up a tier.

The £59 line that catches electricians out

ServiceM8 has a page selling itself to electricians. The day I checked, it printed the whole plan ladder including Free at £0 and Starter at £25, and directly underneath, in Popular Features, advertised "PDF forms & reports. Complete site audits, procedures, or certificates of compliance in the field" and "Job profitability. Estimate how profitable a job will be while you're quoting".

Both are real. Neither is available on either of the two cheapest plans the same page is showing you. Forms and Certificates start at Growing, £59. Job costing starts at Premium, £119. The phrase "Available in" does not appear on that electrician page once. It lives on the pricing page, where a buyer who arrived through the industry page has no reason to go.

So the classic wrong turn goes like this. You do about 40 jobs a month, Starter covers 50, £25 looks sensible, you sign up. Three weeks later you go to build your EICR and the option is not there.

What each plan gives an electrician

Five plans, flat monthly fee, tiered by how many jobs you do rather than per user. Every paid plan has unlimited logins, so the apprentice, the second van and whoever does your invoicing all cost nothing extra.

Scroll the table sideways on a phone.

There is a distinction in that table I have not seen written down anywhere else, and it matters more than the price gap. Using a certificate you bought works on every plan, including the free one. Free and Starter both tick Purchased Forms. What Growing turns on is the ability to build or change your own. So on Starter you can run a bought EICR form and you cannot alter a single question on it. Not the wording, not the order, not your logo in the header.

Two more things off that page. Prices exclude VAT, and ServiceM8 issues reverse charge invoices for you to account for it to HMRC, which most registered businesses reclaim. And the 14 day trial has every feature on and asks for no card, so test it before you spend anything. The whole ladder is in what ServiceM8 really costs in the UK, including the card fees that end up bigger than the subscription.

The Form Store, and the currency nobody mentions

Before you build anything, look at what is already made. The Form Store sells forms as a one off purchase rather than a subscription, it works on any plan including Free, and on 7 September 2026 it held 198 forms.

Search it for "EICR" and you get nothing back. Not one result. The form is in there, listed under its full name instead, which is the sort of thing that sends people away thinking it does not exist.

Yes, those are dollar signs, on the UK store, beside plans priced in pounds. All 198 forms are, from $0.99 to $399.00, so what a $69 certificate costs you depends on the rate that day and your card's foreign transaction fee. Not hidden, and not a scandal. It does tell you these forms were not written for the UK first.

What building your own certificate actually involves

ServiceM8's form builder is not a drag and drop designer. You start with a Microsoft Word template of the finished document, the one carrying your letterhead and your layout, then set up the questions your engineer steps through on site. Their answers drop into the template and produce the PDF.

The question types are the ones the job needs: pick from a list, photo, signature, date, text, number. Questions skip themselves when they do not apply, which is the difference between a form that suits a consumer unit change and one that also covers a full periodic. A form can be pinned to a job type as a mandatory checklist item, so it cannot be quietly skipped, and everything completed is filed to the job diary against that address.

For an EICR that is a day's work to get right. The schedule of test results is long, the circuit details repeat, and the observation codes have to behave properly. Build it once and your engineer taps through it in the van instead of filling in a pad and typing it up at nine at night.

ServiceM8 names three routes to a form on their own pricing page: build your own, buy pre made from the Form Store, or "engage a ServiceM8 Partner to design custom forms for your business". That third one is my day job, and building the certificate properly is the single most valuable part of a setup for an electrician. It is also the part people put off for a year and then never do.

What ServiceM8 will not do for you

Now the bit that does not help my case.

ServiceM8 makes a PDF. It does not certify anything and it does not notify anybody. Nothing in it talks to Building Control, and I have not found any part of the product that connects to a competent person scheme's portal. Whatever you use today to notify notifiable work, you keep using tomorrow.

Be honest with yourself about what that means. If your certification already lives inside your scheme's own online system and you are happy with it, building the same EICR again inside ServiceM8 is typing it twice. That is a real cost and no software page will tell you about it.

Where it pays off is everything around the certificate. The photos of the board before you touched it, the notes, the materials, the quote that became the work, the invoice, the payment, all filed against that address so when the landlord rings in four years you find it in ten seconds. ServiceM8 is good at the pile.

Job counts cut differently for a sparky

Because ServiceM8 bills by jobs rather than by people, your plan depends on the shape of the work rather than the size of the firm.

Rewires, boards and commercial fit outs are few jobs at high values, so one electrician doing that will not go near Growing's 150 a month. Domestic callouts, landlord checks and small remedials are the opposite: five calls a day, twenty working days, and one person is on 100 jobs by himself. Add an apprentice with his own list and you are into Premium at £119 before hiring anybody in the office.

Two things about hitting the cap, both from ServiceM8's own wording. You get a grace period: you can create jobs and work as normal for another seven days, and if your billing month resets inside that window your credits reset with it. And below Premium Plus you cannot buy extra jobs at all. Only Premium Plus publishes a per job overage price, at 15p. On Growing and Premium the answer to a busy month is the next tier up, which is why picking the right one at the start is worth a few minutes.

The £1,000 that pays for the setup

ServiceM8 runs a Setup and Training Rebate, and it is the reason the maths above stops mattering much. If your setup is done by a partner who is both certified and listed in their Partner Directory, ServiceM8 credits your account 100% of what you paid that partner, capped at £1,000. I am both, which is what makes my invoice qualify. The credit lands at 50% of your plan's base price each month until it runs out. It is account credit, not cash.

Run it for the plan an electrician actually needs. The £800 setup and training package comes back as £800. On Growing at £59, half is £29.50 a month, so the credit covers roughly 27 months at half price. Your certificates get built, your team gets trained, and the plan that can issue them costs £29.50 a month for over two years.

One mistake kills the claim before you start, so read this twice. You have to subscribe through the Online Dashboard at servicem8.com/login-page. Subscribe inside the iPhone app and it is an Apple In App Purchase, which their terms exclude, along with third party app stores and subscribing through your Xero account. The claim goes in within 60 days, new subscribers only, and it does not stack: an approved claim replaces any other discount you had running. The full rules are here.

Three more things before you buy

Android gets a cut down app. The full ServiceM8 is iPhone and iPad only. On Android you get ServiceM8 Lite, which cannot take a card payment on site and cannot see anybody else's schedule, along with a list of other gaps. For an electrician who takes payment at the door that is a real problem, and worth settling first. The honest version is in does ServiceM8 work on Android, including the offer that pays for the iPhones instead.

There is no inventory system of its own. No purchase orders, no van stock, no supplier ordering. What it has is stock level visibility mirrored from a connected Xero, MYOB or QuickBooks Online account, and the count only moves when an invoice carrying a tracked item is approved and synced. If your question is how much 2.5mm twin and earth is on van two this morning, this is not the tool.

Your old jobs do not come across. Clients, contacts, your price list and your assets all import. There is no bulk import for historical jobs. Keep the old system readable for a year, pick a clean cutover date, and do not run both at once.

So which plan

Sole trader under 30 jobs a month: start on Free. It is a proper plan rather than a countdown, and you earn extra job credits every time you take a card payment through it.

If you issue certificates, you want Growing at £59. Do not buy Starter to save £34 a month. That £408 a year is the difference between a system that produces your paperwork and a diary with invoices attached, and you will end up upgrading anyway.

Two or more people out and past 150 jobs a month: Premium at £119, and users stay free however many of you there are.

And if you maintain the same emergency lighting, fire alarms and distribution boards year after year rather than only installing them, look hard at asset management, which lands on that same Growing plan. Each unit gets its own record and service history at the address. It is worth setting up properly at the start rather than bolting on after a year of loose job records.

The plan is the easy half. The half that decides whether you are still using it next spring is whether the certificate works properly on the first job you try it on.