Trades·Preston, VIC·2024

Northside Electrical Group

Job status without ringing every van

Office can see which jobs are waiting on parts without calling the vans

Client

Three licensed sparkies, two apprentices, and Michelle in the office. Domestic and light commercial across the northern suburbs — Reservoir, Thornbury, Coburg, plus the odd fit-out in the CBD.

Engagement

Websi-led ops and site build with Michelle as owner. Weekly check-in with the working director after Friday toolbox. No CRM replacement — they kept the ABN spreadsheet for invoicing.

Duration

8 weeks

Services

Property & construction

A Preston-based electrical group was running quotes in WhatsApp and job photos on personal phones. We put a thin job board under the office manager, a quote PDF clients could actually open, and a site that stopped looking like a Facebook page.

Trades
Monday.com
Quotes

Starting point

Quotes lived in WhatsApp threads with the customer’s brother on copy. Photos of switchboards sat on whoever finished the job. Michelle spent late afternoons ringing vans to ask whether a job was waiting on a Clipsal part or just ‘nearly done’. The website was a Facebook cover and a mobile number.

Challenge

Tradies would not fill a 20-field form on a roof. Previous ‘systems’ had died because nobody updated them after week two. The director wanted visibility, not a lecture about process.

Approach

We shadowed two real jobs — a switchboard upgrade in Reservoir and a shop fit-out in Brunswick — then named four statuses the crew already said out loud: quoted, booked, waiting on parts, invoiced. Monday holds the job; photos go to a job-linked album, not Camera Roll. The website lists suburbs they actually service. Automations are narrow: stage change to Michelle, daily digest, and a hard fail ping if a webhook errors.

How it ran

Discovery through launch — emphasis changes by client; this is how this one actually went.

1
Discovery
Rode along on two jobs, photographed the whiteboard, agreed status words in the Friday toolbox.
2
Board & permissions
Monday structure, installer vs office views, parts-hold field that actually gets used.
3
Quotes & site
PDF template, Webflow service pages, enquiry form into the board — not a second inbox.
4
Pilot
Two crews live for a fortnight; shortened labels after they swore at ‘awaiting procurement’.
5
Handover
Loom for new starters, named owner for each automation, how to pause alerts over Christmas.

What we shipped

Job board with four statuses the crew already used
Photo album per job, not personal camera rolls
Locked quote PDF template
Service-area website Michelle can edit

Outcomes

→Michelle stopped the 4pm ‘where are we?’ ring-around on most jobs
→Customers receive a PDF quote they can forward to a landlord
→New enquiry pages name real suburbs instead of ‘Melbourne and surrounds’

Stack

Monday.com (jobs, parts holds, installer views)
Quote PDF from a locked template
Webflow (service-area pages)
Slack alert when an automation failed

Constraints

No Xero rebuild in v1 — invoicing stayed on the existing spreadsheet-to-Xero habit
Apprentices only update status; they cannot edit quote totals
Peak-season freeze on board changes for six weeks after go-live