Tom is a sparky's sparky — second-generation electrician, master license, twelve years on his own. His company is small on purpose. He turned down two opportunities to grow because — as he told us — "I want to stay small and tight. I don't want to manage fifteen guys. I want to do good work for a small group of property managers who pay on time and call me first."
That small-and-tight philosophy is rare in the trade. It also creates a specific operational shape: every customer matters more than they would in a 50-person shop, and every recurring obligation has to be visible because there's no office manager to remember it for him.
The day before OpsLight
Tom's biggest pain wasn't intake — his customers texted, mostly. It wasn't dispatch — he and his guys could coordinate via text. It was the month-end status email that each of his 14 property-manager customers expected on the 1st.
The pattern: each PM wanted a summary of all electrical work performed at their properties that month, what was done, what parts were replaced, what code observations he'd made, and what they should plan for next month. Each one took about twenty-five minutes to assemble. Fourteen of them was six hours. That six hours used to start at 7am the last Saturday of every month and run through lunch.
It wasn't hard work. It was the worst kind of work: tedious, recurring, and required. Miss it and the PM relationship suffered. Do it badly and you came across like a one-truck operation. Do it well and nobody mentioned it — they just kept paying you.
Tom had tried two paths to fix this. He'd tried hiring a part-time bookkeeper who'd do the reports on Friday mornings — that lasted six months until she found a full-time job. He'd tried Procore (massive overkill, $400/month, and his electricians would have needed to enter data into it which they wouldn't). He'd settled into the Saturday-morning routine because it was the path of least pain.
"I'm not afraid of paperwork. I'm afraid of being the only person who can do it. If I get the flu the last week of the month, fourteen property managers are unhappy at the same time."
Tom Reilly · Reilly ElectricHow Tom found OpsLight
One of Tom's PM customers ran an OpsLight install with their plumber, mentioned it casually during a quarterly catch-up. The plumber's monthly summary now arrived on the 1st automatically; she'd never asked. She told Tom and gave him the contact.
The setup focused on the report rather than the intake:
- The monthly-PM-report template. Tom walked us through what each PM expected, what the headers looked like, which sections each one cared about (some wanted detailed parts lists, some just wanted a one-page summary). We built a template per account.
- The 14-account list and their preferences. Each account's contact, billing cadence, retainer scope, and report-style preference.
- The crew SMS check-in flow. So that each visit performed during the month was logged with a timestamp and a "what we did" note that could be assembled into the monthly report at month-end.
- The permit-and-inspection tracker. Pending inspection windows would surface in the daily Game Plan so they never got missed.
Live in two weeks. The first month-end ran without Tom doing anything until the morning of the 1st, when 14 draft emails sat in his outbox waiting for review.
Three moments from a regular month
The work order that wrote itself into the monthly report
Tom's electrician Hector finished replacing two GFI outlets and a tripping breaker at a Berkeley office building. He texted Tom: OUT brookline-medical GFI replace 2x in lab, breaker B-14 was tripping under load, replaced. Customer happy. OpsLight logged the visit to the brookline-medical project row, captured the work-note, and counted toward the month's total for that account. Tom saw the update in tomorrow's Game Plan.
The report draft loop
At 2am on the 28th, OpsLight ran the monthly-report job. It assembled 14 reports — one per PM account — by pulling every visit logged that month and formatting it in each PM's preferred template. Drafts landed in Tom's email-drafts folder.
The 30-minute review-and-send
Tom got to his desk on the 1st, opened his drafts, reviewed each report (typical edits: 1-2 minor wording tweaks per report), and clicked send. Total time: 28 minutes. He used to spend six hours on this. He used the four-and-a-half hours saved to take his kids to the Berkeley Marina that Saturday.
Six months later
Tom didn't grow the business. He didn't add a tech. His revenue per month is up roughly 6% because he closed two additional retainer accounts — one referred directly by an existing PM customer who'd shown the monthly report to her counterpart at another firm. The other came from Tom's own newfound bandwidth: he had time, for the first time in three years, to network with PMs at events instead of catching up on paperwork.
The bigger change: he hasn't worked a Saturday morning in five months. Once we'd handled the monthly report, the rest of his Friday-paperwork stack collapsed — every visit was already logged, every invoice was already drafted, every callback was already scheduled. The phrase he used was "the Friday math just stopped."
What's configured specifically for electrical
- Electrical-vocabulary intake classifier. Knows panels (200A, 400A, 800A), feeder vs branch circuits, AFCI / GFCI / DFCI distinctions, code references (NEC 210.8, 250.66, 408), failure modes (tripping breaker, hot panel, flickering lights, loss of phase).
- Permit + inspection tracker. Each project row has permit number, AHJ, inspection-window date, and status. Surfaces in daily Game Plan when windows are approaching.
- Monthly PM report template per account. Different PMs want different formats — OpsLight templates each account individually.
- 33/33/33 deposit structure. Optional per-project. OpsLight tracks the milestone for each progress payment and reminds when each is due.
- Closeout packet. Permit sign-off, inspection result, final invoice, lien waiver, warranty letter, panel schedule update.
- Crew SMS keywords. Standard IN/OUT plus electrical-specific
INSPECT(inspection passed/failed),PERMIT(permit obtained or expired),CALLBACK(return work needed).
What electrical contractors ask us
Does this replace QuickBooks?
No. OpsLight feeds QuickBooks (or whatever you use). The work orders, the SOW data, the closeout packets — all exportable. Most electricians keep their existing accounting and just stop the duplicate data entry.
How does the permit tracker interact with my AHJ?
It doesn't directly. OpsLight tracks the permit metadata (number, jurisdiction, inspection date, status) and reminds you when inspection windows approach. It doesn't file permits or schedule inspections on your behalf — that's still you or your inspector handling the AHJ portal.
What if my PM wants a custom report format?
That's the install work. We sit with you, look at each customer's expectations, and template per-account. Once configured, the template runs forever — only changes when a PM specifically asks for an update.
Can OpsLight handle service-call dispatch like a plumber would need?
Yes — the same intake-and-classify engine works for break/fix electrical service calls. We mostly hear from electricians who do recurring maintenance retainers, but the engine handles both shapes.
What about Section 608 / EPA reporting?
OpsLight isn't an EPA filing tool — that's adjacent to HVAC anyway, not electrical. For electrical, the closest analog is permit compliance, which OpsLight tracks but doesn't file.