Electrical job management software: VAT rate per line

A landlord asks for a rewire and a new consumer unit in a house that has stood empty for three years, a battery and a heat pump in the same property, and an EV charge point at the flat they are living in meanwhile. One customer, one week, four different VAT positions — and if a contractor rather than the landlord engages you for part of it, no VAT at all on that part.

That is the week electrical job management software either survives or quietly starts costing you money.

The rate belongs on the line, not on the document

Software that stores one VAT rate per invoice can price that week only by splitting it into three documents or overriding a total by hand. Zirko carries a tax rate and a tax category on every line of a quote or an invoice, and refuses to finalise a document where a line's rate and its category contradict each other. Priced line by line instead of at 20 percent across the board, that landlord's bill moves by thousands — the arithmetic is worked through in the four VAT positions one UK dwelling can carry.

What Zirko will not do is decide which rate applies. Whether a dwelling has genuinely been empty for two years is a fact about your customer's building, and no software can look at it.

Electrician quoting software with 31 March 2027 in view

The zero rate on installed energy-saving materials — solar, battery storage, heat pumps — runs to 31 March 2027 and reverts to 5 percent the day after. Quote a spring installation in late 2026 and your quote crosses that date, so it has to say which rate the price assumes.

Most electrical quoting software in the UK treats a quote as a price list. Zirko treats it as the first version of the invoice: the quote becomes the order confirmation, then the invoice, and the line items travel with it — rates, categories and all. A measurement written into a site report on the phone moves into the invoice line with a marker saying which report it came from. Nobody measures twice, and nobody retypes a number.

You certify your own work — so keep the certificate on the job

Part P is self-certification through your scheme: no third party in the loop, no statutory reporting window, which is exactly why this paperwork drifts. Only three kinds of job in an English dwelling are notifiable at all, and which electrical jobs are notifiable names them.

Zirko does not issue BS 7671 certificates — those come from your scheme provider and your test instrument software. What it does is hold the certificate, the photographs, the signed site report and the invoice on the same job instead of on whoever happened to raise them, in a folder tree you build yourself. For each folder you decide whether the site sees it; on the phone, line items come from a reading view that carries no prices at all.

CIS takes its cut from labour only

If you subcontract, your line items have to separate labour from material for a reason that has nothing to do with costing: the deduction of 20 or 30 percent is computed from the labour element alone — the mechanics are in 20 percent, 30 percent or nothing at all. In Zirko a service is an assembly of cost types: labour minutes from a wage group, material, equipment, subcontracting. The split exists before anyone asks you for a payment and deduction statement.

Priced by the people who use it, not by the jobs you do

Plans are counted in office seats, with field licences for anyone who only works on site; the mobile application comes with every office seat at no extra charge. Nothing is metered by jobs per month — which decides more than the headline price for a firm living on small domestic callouts, where job count and turnover are not the same axis. Billing is in euros, for UK businesses too. Fourteen days free, the full range of functions, no payment details, and the trial ends by itself.