Electrician contractor software with your own tax rates

Most software sold to electrical contractors asks you to pick a sales tax rate from a list. That list is the problem. There is no federal sales tax in the United States, rates are set by each state and by thousands of local jurisdictions below it, and whether a tax line belongs on a construction invoice at all depends on the work, the property and the contract form. A suggested rate would be a tax opinion, and we do not give those.

You enter the rates, because only you know which ones apply

A US business sets up its own rates in the settings. A rate has a name you choose — the city and state it applies to, say — and up to four components, each with its own label and percentage, so a State, County and City rate adds up the way your authority actually adds it up. The resolved figure sits on the customer, and the components stay visible on the document.

There is also a third state, and it is not zero percent: an invoice with no tax line at all, where gross equals net. That is a deliberate state in the data, not a rate of nothing, because a job that is not taxable and a job taxed at zero are different facts. Which of your jobs is which is set out state by state in the same job taxed three different ways.

The license is a state question and it stays one

Texas licenses electricians through the Department of Licensing and Regulation under Occupations Code Chapter 1305, from apprentice through master, with separate business licenses such as electrical contractor. California licenses the contractor instead, exempts work under $1,000 in narrow circumstances, and requires two exams. Florida splits every contractor into certified and registered. Cities and counties add their own registrations on top — the shape of it is in three states, three different answers.

Nothing here renews a license or tells you which one you need. What it does is keep the job, the technician who did it, the hours, the photos and the issued documents in one record — so when somebody asks who was on that panel in March, the answer is not a group chat.

Estimates become invoices, and invoices stay put

Fourteen document types come out of the same editor. The estimate becomes the order confirmation, then the invoice, and the line items travel with it instead of being retyped. Line items sit in an outline tree, carry markup per cost type, and show contribution margin per line and per document — including when a discount pushes it negative.

Once a document is finished it cannot be changed. A correction is a credit note or a cancellation invoice with its own number. Eight number ranges run without gaps, and the server issues the number, not the browser, so an unbroken sequence does not depend on a signal in a parking garage. When payment is late, the clocks that matter are statutory and different in every state — seven days, thirty-five days, two percent a month — and they are laid out in three states, three different penalties.

Readings, photos and a signature, taken where the work happened

Report templates are assembled from blocks: date, period, crew, number fields, free text, photo and signature. Test readings go in the number fields; a mandatory field cannot be skipped to close the report. The customer signs on the phone with a finger, and the finished report hangs on the job, not in a folder on somebody's desktop.

Time tracking follows: twelve time types on the phone, and an hour carried into a document is marked at its origin so it cannot be billed twice. Accounts payable arrives at your own inbox address, is read on your own device, and hangs on the job so the costing finds it.

Where the boundaries are

No route optimization, no map of your service area, no dispatch board that thinks for you. No public API today; exchange runs over files. And no tax advice, ever: the rates are yours, entered by you, and Zirko does the arithmetic with them and nothing more.