Electrical job management software: the seven-day CCEW

Ask an Australian sparky when a job finishes and the answer is: when the certificate is in. In New South Wales that is seven days after the safety and compliance test. In Victoria, on prescribed work, it is after somebody who does not work for you has been out to inspect it. Neither is a paperwork problem. Both are scheduling problems — and that is what this software is for.

Seven days in New South Wales, sixteen in Victoria

NSW Government guidance requires a licensed electrician to submit a Certificate of Compliance Electrical Work (CCEW) "no later than 7 days after completing the work, including the safety and compliance test", lodged through the BCNSW eCert portal or an approved API. The scope is wider than most expect: it names like-for-like replacement of water heaters, ovens and stove tops. For a service business that is one certificate per visit, not one a week.

Victoria counts differently. A prescribed Certificate of Electrical Safety must reach the customer, the distribution business and Energy Safe Victoria within 16 calendar days of completion; non-prescribed certificates go out within one month. Both deadlines are set out in the certificate clock that starts when you finish testing.

In Zirko the job carries a status you name yourself — tested, awaiting certificate, lodged — and a status change can set off a reminder to the office instead of to nobody. The status is what runs late, not the invoice.

The inspector is in somebody else's diary

Energy Safe Victoria lists ten prescribed categories — among them consumer mains, hazardous area work, high voltage and generation, which includes battery energy storage. For all of them an independent licensed electrical inspector must attend before the work can be connected to supply.

So the same battery install is a different job either side of the Murray: in Victoria the critical path contains a third party, in New South Wales it does not. The planning board runs from one week to half a year and schedules your own people — the inspector is not one of them. What it stops is the office promising a date that assumes your last day on site is the customer's first day with power.

Quotes with GST in the right place, for both kinds of customer

The ACCC requires a business to display the total price as a single figure including taxes — and says plainly that a business displaying prices only to other businesses does not need to include GST. Most tradies work both sides of that line in the same week: a homeowner quote inclusive, a builder quote ex GST.

One price list carries cost, markup and sell price; the tax is applied per line of the document, so the same material does not get retyped for the second presentation. What has to appear on the finished document is in what has to be on an Australian tax invoice, and whether you charge GST at all starts with the test in it is not last year's turnover.

What the sparky records is what the office bills

Report templates are built from blocks: date, period, staff, a number field, free text, photo and a signature taken with a finger on the phone. Test readings go in the number fields, the switchboard goes in as a photo, and fields you mark as mandatory stop a report being closed half-written.

Timesheets work the same way in reverse: an hour taken into a document carries an origin marker and leaves the selection, so the same hour cannot reach two invoices. And a completed document stays completed — a correction is a credit note or a cancellation with its own number, never an edit.

What it will not do for you

It does not issue a CCEW or a Certificate 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 judgment belongs to the licensed person who did the work. There is no built-in seven-day rule either: the due date lives where you put it, on the job, with a status and a reminder you set yourself.