Electrical Field Service Software: What an Ontario Shop Needs
Electrical field service software, for a one- to five-person shop in Ontario, has to do four things well. It sends a quote that carries your ECRA/ESA licence number. It follows each job through the ESA notification and inspection. It keeps the photos that show what went behind the wall. And it gets the invoice paid. Dispatch boards and route planning don't matter until somebody in the office is dispatching (that's later). Before that, I think an entry tier is enough. The entry tiers below run from $0 to $79 USD a month. The choice comes down to job caps, user counts and how your jobs move.
Prices in the table are dated 2026-10-08.
I build FixyFlow in Collingwood, so treat the FixyFlow section as a vendor's view. The rest is what I'd check if I ran a small electrical shop between Barrie, Owen Sound and the Blue Mountains with a free evening to pick a tool.
Why does an electrical job need different software from a plumbing call?
Because any job that needs an ESA notification has a third party on it. In Ontario, the Electrical Safety Authority (ESA) says the person doing the work, you or a Licensed Electrical Contractor, should file a notification before the work starts. Once the work is reviewed and passed, ESA issues a Certificate of Acceptance to whoever filed the notification.
ESA also tells homeowners to look for your licence number "on their truck, business card, and estimate." So the estimate template isn't a cosmetic choice for an electrician. If your software can't put the ECRA/ESA number on the quote (in a footer, a note field, wherever), a careful customer may notice.
That gives an electrical job a few extra states that a drain call doesn't have: notification filed, waiting on ESA, passed, certificate sent. The software doesn't need to talk to ESA. It does need a way to show those steps, to you and ideally to the customer, so nobody calls the office to ask where things stand.
One panel change, followed from quote to certificate
Here's a residential panel change walked through the steps, with what the software should be holding at each one. (The dollar side of the same job, permit line included, is in the electrician hourly rate in Ontario breakdown, so I won't repeat it here.)
| Step | What happens | What the software should hold |
|---|---|---|
| Quote | The homeowner asks for a price | Line items, your licence number, and a record of when the customer said yes |
| Notification | ESA says to file before the work starts | The notification number against the job (a note is enough) |
| The work | Old panel out, new panel in, circuits moved over | Photos attached to the job, taken before anything is covered |
| Inspection | The work is reviewed and passed | A stage the customer can see, such as "Waiting on ESA inspection" |
| Certificate | ESA issues the Certificate of Acceptance to the filer | A note that the customer got their copy, and when |
| Invoice | Final amount and payment | The invoice and a way to pay from a phone |
ESA has its own tools for this. In the ESA ON Mobile app, ESA account holders can schedule wiring notifications for inspection, check the status of notifications, and submit photo or video evidence. ESA Online Services lets you submit notifications online and make payments. In my view, the filing belongs there. The field service software is for the other half: the customer, the quote, the photos, the money. The homeowner is waiting on that inspection too. That wait is exactly the stretch where a short text saves a phone call.
Which features earn their place in a small electrical shop?
In my judgment, five features carry most of the weight for a shop of one to five people doing mostly residential service and renovation work:
- Quotes with online approval. A quote texted the same afternoon, with an approve button, is easier for the customer to answer than a PDF in an inbox.
- Job stages you can rename. "Booked, In progress, Done" doesn't fit a job that sits for days waiting on an inspection. You want to add the ESA steps yourself.
- Photos stored on the job. Before and after shots, plus the inside of the panel (before the cover goes back on), kept with the job record rather than in your camera roll.
- Customer texts at each step. An "on my way" text, and a short update when the job moves, so the homeowner isn't left guessing.
- An invoice with a payment link. Customers can pay from their phone the same day (no chasing).
Then there are the features I'd leave for later: dispatch boards, route planning, fleet tracking, payroll, service agreements. They're real needs for a commercial shop with a dispatcher and maintenance contracts. A two-van residential shop can run without them for a long time. The demo will show you all of it, but you only pay for what your tier includes, and the features you skip are the cheapest ones to skip.
One middle case: you price flat-rate, not by the hour. Then a price book starts to matter. It keeps the same job at the same price no matter who quotes it. Before you pick a tier, check that its plan includes a price book.
What the entry tiers cost, side by side
Housecall Pro's prices are in US dollars and exclusive of sales tax. I'd budget for the exchange rate and tax on top of every row.
| Plan | Price (USD per month) | What that price includes |
|---|---|---|
| ServiceM8 Free | $0 | 1 user, 30 jobs a month, texts at 10c per SMS |
| ServiceM8 Starter | $29 | Unlimited users, 50 jobs a month |
| ServiceM8 Growing | $79 | 150 jobs a month |
| Housecall Pro Basic | $59 billed annually, $79 month to month | 1 user |
| Housecall Pro Essentials | $149 billed annually, $189 month to month | 5 users |
| FixyFlow Free | $0 | 5 jobs and 20 texts a month |
| FixyFlow Starter | $19 | 50 jobs and 200 texts a month |
| FixyFlow Pro | $29 | 200 jobs and 1,000 texts a month |
Watch the job cap. A solo electrician doing three calls every weekday books roughly 66 jobs in a month (three calls a day times about 22 working days), which is past the 50-job line on both ServiceM8 Starter and FixyFlow Starter. Count last month's jobs before you pick a tier. Your calendar and your sent texts will have most of them. FixyFlow's full field service software pricing has the annual numbers too. And if you want the comparison across more tools than these, there is a field service software comparison page and a post with each service business CRM ranked by yearly cost.
Where FixyFlow fits an electrical shop, and where it doesn't
FixyFlow is a job tracker that texts the customer as the job moves. For the panel change above, that covers more of the table than you might expect:
- Stages: the workflow stages are yours to name, so "Notification filed" and "Waiting on ESA inspection" can be real steps. And the customer gets a text when the job moves on.
- Quotes: an estimate with line items and a note the customer can read shows up on their tracking page with an Approve button. The note is a reasonable place for your licence number.
- Photos: photos are grouped by stage, and if you add them at the first and last stage, a before and after comparison appears on the tracking page.
- On my way: when the next stage is an "On My Way" stage, one tap moves the job and texts the customer.
- Getting paid: you add the invoice amount and a payment link (Stripe, Square or PayPal), and the customer sees a Pay Now button.
Where it doesn't fit: there is no dispatch board, no route planning and no price book, and it doesn't file or track anything with ESA. If you run a commercial shop with a dispatcher, you need a dispatch board, and FixyFlow is the wrong tool. Housecall Pro Basic includes dispatch and a price book. The post on a ServiceTitan alternative for a small business explains where that line sits. You can also run FixyFlow next to a bigger tool just for the customer texts (that works, but it's two tools to keep in step).
Test it on one real job before you commit
ServiceM8 offers a 14-day free trial. Housecall Pro gives you its MAX plan free for 14 days. A new FixyFlow account gets a 14-day free trial with no credit card. That's long enough to put one real job through every row of the table above, and that tells you more than a demo call. During the trial, check five things:
- Can your licence number appear on the quote the customer sees?
- Can you add a stage for the ESA notification and one for the inspection?
- Do photos stay on the job, sorted by step, without extra taps on a ladder?
- Does the customer get a text when the job moves, without you writing one?
- Can the customer pay from the invoice link on their phone?
If a tool fails two of those five on a simple panel job, I wouldn't expect it to do better on a basement renovation. If you want to try the FixyFlow version of that test, start a free 14-day trial of FixyFlow's field service software (no credit card). Set up your ESA stages. Run your next quote through it.
— Lasse
Built FixyFlow in Collingwood