22 September 2026
Most guides to digitalisation in the trades walk a business, phase by phase, through the modules of a piece of software. For an electrical contractor that is the wrong order: which step comes first is decided not by the vendor but by the duty that is first to trigger a deadline or a burden of proof — the Rapport, the measurement and test report, the safety certificate.
Digitalisation in the trades does not mean buying a program and then adapting the work to it. For an electrical contractor in Switzerland it means getting the paperwork to where it belongs: the Rapport (the signed record of work done on site) to the site for signature, the measured values to the installation, the safety certificate (Sicherheitsnachweis, SiNa) to the inspection period. And which step comes first is decided not by the vendor, nor by the order in which it rolls its product out, but by the duty that is first to trigger a deadline or a burden of proof in the business.
Guides to digitalisation in the trades almost all follow the same pattern: phase one time tracking, phase two quotes and invoices, phase three customer management, phase four materials, phase five reporting. That is the order in which software gets introduced, and for a painting or plumbing business it is plausible.
For an electrical contractor it is the wrong order, for a reason a general plan cannot know: two of the most expensive documents in an electrical business do not belong to the order at all. They belong to the installation, they are needed years later, and for one of them a deadline runs that nobody in the business set.
Whoever digitalises along this pattern has tidy invoicing after four months — and the measurement reports still as photos on the phone of an electrician who has since moved to another firm.
The Regie Rapport, because it shifts the burden of proof. Regie is work outside the quote, billed at rate. Under Art. 8 of the ZGB (Swiss Civil Code), the burden of proof lies with whoever derives rights from a fact — for Regie work, that is the business, for its own effort. According to the case law of the Federal Supreme Court, a Rapport signed by the customer or the site management establishes a natural presumption that it is correct; the customer has to rebut it with substantiated objections, rather than the business having to prove it. A Rapport that is only written up back at the office can no longer obtain that signature. The article "Getting the Regie Rapport signed" covers this in detail.
The measurement and test report, because it outlives the installation. It documents a condition at a point in time and is needed again at the next inspection — which may be ten or twenty years later. A system that files documents under the order loses them with the order. See "Measurement and test report".
The safety certificate, because it carries a deadline that comes from outside. At least six months before the inspection period ends, the grid operator — in certain cases the ESTI (Federal Inspectorate for Heavy Current Installations) — asks the owner in writing to submit the safety certificate. It must be submitted by the end of the inspection period; the deadline can be extended by at most one year beyond that. If it is still not submitted after two reminders, the grid operator hands enforcement over to the ESTI. The procedure is set out in the article "Safety certificate: deadline passed".
These three share a property no time tracking has: they cannot be made up later. A forgotten hour can be reconstructed. A signature that was not obtained on site, and a measurement nobody wrote down, cannot.
Four steps, in this sequence, because each one makes the next possible:
The order is not a matter of taste. Step two without step one produces Rapporte that hang on no installation; step four without step two produces invoices that prove nothing in a dispute.
Customer, property and installation are three things. The customer is the property management firm, the property is the building, the installation is the distribution board inside it. What changes is almost always the customer; the property and the installation stay. Software that only knows a customer with an address loses the installation's history every time the management changes. More on this in "ERP and CRM for electricians".
Material prices live with the wholesaler. A system that has you maintain your own article catalogues turns the office into a price copyist. It should read the catalogues.
Accounting is connected, not replaced. The fiduciary (the external accountant) does not change programs because the business software is new. Which connections elektro.box has today is listed on the Integrations page.
Guides to digitalisation in the trades like to quote concrete savings: so many hours a week, an error rate down from X to Y, payback in three to four months. Such figures stand there without a source, they are conspicuously round, and they almost never come from a business that looks like the reader's.
A business that wants to know what switching will bring it is better off measuring two things about itself, over two weeks and on paper:
The business knows these two figures after two weeks, they apply to it rather than to an average, and they are at the same time the justification for the order above.
Six questions before an electrical contractor starts digitalising — for the vendor or for your own approach:
Where does an electrical contractor start with digitalisation? With the installations and their inspection periods, not with invoicing. The safety certificate is the only document in the business tied to a deadline set from outside — everything else can be made up later.
How long does it take to digitalise a trade business? There is no honest general answer, because it depends less on the software than on how many installations the business looks after and how well their paperwork is kept together today. Recording the installations is usually the longest of the four stages, and the only one nobody can shortcut.
Does switching require IT knowledge in the business? Not for using it. For the decision, yes — but they are not IT questions, they are trade questions: whether the installation is a record of its own, whether Regie stays separate from the order, whether the file outlives the order.
Is digitalisation in the trades the same as new software? No. Software is the tool; digitalisation is the decision about where a piece of information will live from now on and who records it. A business that does not answer that question has the same scraps of paper after the rollout — only more expensive.
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