The certificate clock that starts after testing: NSW, Victoria

An Australian electrician's deadline does not start when the invoice goes out. It starts the moment the safety and compliance test is finished — and in New South Wales it runs for seven days.

That single sentence is the reason electrical job management software is a different purchase here from anywhere else. The tax is simple: one rate, 10 percent, unchanged since 1 July 2000 under section 9-70 of the GST Act. The certification is not. Two of the three largest states run entirely different instruments with different clocks, different lodgement channels and, in Victoria, a third party who has to physically attend before the power can go on.

New South Wales: seven days from the test

NSW Government guidance is unambiguous about both the deadline and where it starts. A licensed electrician must submit a Certificate of Compliance Electrical Work "no later than 7 days after completing the work, including the safety and compliance test", by lodging it on the BCNSW eCert portal or an approved API. The governing instruments are the Gas and Electricity (Consumer Safety) Act and the Gas and Electricity (Consumer Safety) Regulation 2018.

The scope is wider than most people assume. A CCEW is required for "any type of electrical work that involves installing, repairing, adding or altering electrical equipment to an electrical installation" — and the guidance names the borderline case rather than leaving it to argument: this "explicitly encompasses like-for-like replacement of electrical equipment such as water heaters, ovens, stove tops and electrical accessories."

Swapping a dead oven for the same model is a CCEW. So is replacing a hot water unit. For a service business that is not one certificate a week, it is one certificate per visit, and seven days later it is a penalty — 20 penalty units for an individual, 40 otherwise, under section 37A.

Victoria: ten categories and an inspector in your calendar

Victoria splits the same duty in two. Under the Electricity Safety Act 1998 and the Electricity Safety (General) Regulations 2019, every job gets a Certificate of Electrical Safety, but prescribed work gets a different one from non-prescribed work, and the difference is a person.

Energy Safe Victoria lists ten prescribed categories: consumer mains; tenancy mains; hazardous area; high voltage installations; generation, standby or co-generation, including battery energy storage systems; security fences; remote area power supplies exceeding 500 volt amperes; medical patient areas; safety services; and a Part 1 Solution.

For all of those, "a licensed electrical inspector" must carry out an independent inspection before the certificate can be issued, and the work cannot be "connected to electricity supply" until it has been inspected and certified. That is not a paperwork step. It is a booking with somebody who does not work for you, on a date you cannot set alone, between your last day on site and the customer having power.

The handover deadlines differ too. Copies of prescribed certificates "must be provided to the relevant parties within 16 calendar days from completion", reaching the customer, the distribution business and Energy Safe Victoria. Non-prescribed certificates go to the customer and Energy Safe Victoria within one month, with no independent inspection.

This compares New South Wales and Victoria only, checked on 21 September 2026. Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia, Tasmania, the ACT and the Northern Territory each run their own certificate under their own instrument, with their own deadline. None of the figures above travel across a border — and if that pattern feels familiar, it is the same eight-jurisdiction problem that governs getting paid, set out in eight jurisdictions, eight sets of deadlines.

The battery is the clearest example

A household battery is the job where the two halves of this article collide, and where Australia looks nothing like the United Kingdom.

In Victoria a battery energy storage system is generation, which means it is prescribed, which means an independent licensed electrical inspector has to attend before the system can be connected. In New South Wales the same battery is electrical work like any other: test it, certify it, lodge the CCEW within seven days.

So the identical scope of works, quoted by the identical business, has a different critical path depending on which side of the Murray it sits. In one state the schedule contains a dependency on a third party. In the other it does not. Software that treats the certificate as a document attached to a finished job cannot see that difference; software that treats it as a task with a due date and a responsible person can.

What the certificate is not

It is worth being blunt about the boundary, because it gets blurred in sales material.

A Certificate of Compliance Electrical Work and a Certificate of Electrical Safety are statements by a licensed person about work that licensed person did. No software issues them, none of them can be produced by a system on your behalf, and none of the lodgement portals will accept one from a business that is not licensed. What software can do is hold the due date, hold the evidence the certificate is written from, and make sure the person who did the test is the person the system asks to sign it.

The same distinction runs through the rest of Australian trade compliance: the licence is personal or corporate, the record is yours, and the system is only ever a filing cabinet with an alarm clock. Where the licensing thresholds themselves sit is in three thresholds, and the same punishment for getting it wrong.

The tax part is the easy part — but read the price you are comparing

Because Australia has one GST rate, the invoicing question that dominates a British electrician's life barely exists here. What replaces it is a display question, and the software market demonstrates it better than any explanation could.

Checked on 21 September 2026, ServiceM8's Australian pricing page states plainly: "Prices are in AUD and include GST", above plans at $29, $79, $149 and $349 per business with unlimited users, metered by jobs per month at 50, 150, 500 and 1,500. Tradify's Australian page prices Lite, Pro and Plus at $48, $52 and $62 per user per month, each marked "Ex GST".

Two vendors in the same category, on the same day, quoting on opposite tax bases. ServiceM8's Growing plan at $79 including GST is $71.82 before tax. Tradify's Pro at $52 before tax is $57.20 with it. An electrician comparing 79 against 52 is comparing a number that contains GST against one that does not — the real gap on a single-user business is $19.82, not $27.

That is not a criticism of either page; both state what they are doing. It is a warning about the arithmetic, and it is the same arithmetic you do to your own customers every day. What has to be on the invoice at the end of it is in the $75 and $1,000 lines on an Australian tax invoice, and whether you charge GST at all depends on the registration turnover threshold in s 23-15 of the GST Act, which looks forward as well as back.

One job, two states, same week

Monday: a licensed electrician finishes a hot water unit replacement in Parramatta and completes the safety and compliance test at 3 pm. The CCEW is due by the following Monday. It is lodged on eCert that evening from the van, because the seven days are the only part of the job nobody is paying for.

Tuesday: the same business starts a battery install in Preston. The install finishes Thursday. It cannot be energised. A licensed electrical inspector is booked for the following Tuesday — the earliest available — and the customer is told on Thursday, not on Tuesday. The prescribed certificate goes to the customer, the distribution business and Energy Safe Victoria inside 16 days of completion.

One of those jobs is finished when the electrician leaves site. The other is finished five days later, by somebody else. A schedule that cannot represent that difference will keep promising the wrong date to the customer — and no amount of good intention at the office end fixes a calendar that has no room for the inspector in it.

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Position as at 21 September 2026, checked against NSW Government guidance on when to submit a CCEW, Energy Safe Victoria's guidance on prescribed and non-prescribed electrical installation work and on Certificates of Electrical Safety, and the GST Act as published on that date. It is not legal advice, and it covers New South Wales and Victoria only. The part most likely to move is the lodgement channel rather than the deadline: NSW has been consolidating certificate lodgement into the BCNSW eCert portal, so confirm the accepted submission method before relying on an API integration — the seven days are statutory, the portal is not.

What Zirko does here: it keeps the job, the site photographs, the recorded hours and the issued documents together, so that the certificate due date is a property of the job rather than a note in somebody's phone, and it stores what was issued instead of letting an issued invoice be edited. What Zirko does not do: it does not issue Certificates of Compliance Electrical Work or Certificates of Electrical Safety, it does not lodge to eCert or to Energy Safe Victoria, and it cannot tell you whether a job is prescribed — that is a judgment for the licensed person who did the work.