Certificates are produced on site rather than typed up on Saturday. Instrument calibration is tied to the certificates it appears on. Part P notification dates and ECS grading turn amber before they lapse, and a certificate issued in year one is found by the job in year five. Around thirty modules on one account, and an electrical firm turns on the handful it needs.
From the first fix to the certificate somebody asks for in year five.
Commercial, industrial, domestic or renewables: the installation differs, the office side does not.
The installation is the part an electrical firm already has right. It is the document behind it that carries the liability: which instrument it was tested with, whether that instrument was in calibration, who was graded to sign it, and whether anybody can still find it when a client asks five years later.
Unibuild is construction management software for UK contractors, built inside a contracting business rather than sold into one. One account carries the labour run, plant and equipment registers, materials and stock, certification and training records, documents, day works, variations and applications for payment.
Built for electrical
What electrical contracting requires, and what Unibuild provides.
A fit-out job and an electrical job look alike in a database. They stop looking alike at the test instrument, at the notification deadline, and in year five when the certificate is asked for. Each requirement below is followed by what the platform does about it.
The tradeThe platform
What you invoice is not what you sell
The certificate is the deliverable
Three documents cover nearly all of it: the installation certificate for new work, minor works for small alterations, and the condition report for an existing installation. The wiring is how you produced them.
The document outlives the job, the client and often the firm
A certificate carries a named signatory, not a company logo
Reissuing one years later is routine and should be trivial
Losing them is a commercial and a regulatory problem at once
Certificates produced on site
EIC, EICR and Minor Works Certificates are created on the phone where the work is, numbered and branded to your firm, and finished the moment they are saved. There is no paper original, so there is no transcription step and no transcription error on Saturday morning.
Every reading is the basis of a safety decision, so the make, model, serial number and calibration status of the tester belong on the certificate itself.
Loop impedance decides whether a circuit disconnects under fault
Insulation resistance decides whether cable is leaking
A lapsed calibration puts every certificate issued on it in question
The calibration certificate is routinely asked for with the report
Calibration tied to the certificate
Each instrument is held as its own record with make, model, serial number and full calibration history, in the same register the certificates draw from. An instrument out of calibration is visible before it appears on a signature rather than afterwards.
Notifiable domestic work has to reach building control, and for most firms that runs through self certification under a competent person scheme rather than through the council.
Membership of a scheme is what allows you to self certify
The client receives a building regulations compliance certificate
The window is short and nobody chases you until it has closed
The person who does the notifying is usually one person
The notification date watched
The job carries the completion date and the notification window, and the reminder page flags it before it passes. It does not notify building control for you and it has no integration with a competent person scheme, which is set out in the site notice below.
Scheme membership is not a badge you buy once. It is an assessment against the wiring regulations, the building regulations and your own records, repeated on a cycle.
A sample of completed work is inspected
Certificates and records are examined
Instruments and their calibration are checked
Competence of the people signing is part of it
The assessment pack already assembled
The evidence an assessor asks for, certificates issued, instrument calibration, training records, insurances and accident reporting, sits in one place against the year it belongs to. The assessment becomes a retrieval rather than a fortnight of hunting.
The card scheme and the industry grading distinguish an apprentice from an electrician from an approved electrician, and the distinction decides both the rate and what somebody may put their name to.
Cards state the grade, not simply that a person is an electrician
Grading affects the rate the job is priced at
Who may sign a certificate is a competence question
Principal contractors ask for the grade, not the trade
Grade held against the person
ECS cards carry the grade rather than the fact of being an electrician, and the training matrix holds it per person with its expiry, turning amber before it lapses. What the gate asks for is produced from one page instead of four.
Cable in walls, containment above ceilings, circuits behind a board front. The installation cannot be reinspected without dismantling it, so the schedule of results is the installation as far as anyone later is concerned.
Routes and containment are covered within days
The record of the readings is the only lasting description
A future alteration is priced off your drawings or off guesswork
The next contractor inherits whatever you wrote down
Found by the job in year five
Certificates, permits, photographs and reports sit against the project and the asset they belong to, with an audit trail on the document itself. When a client asks in year five, it is retrieved by the job rather than searched for across a mailbox and a filing cabinet.
Counted in the deployment Unibuild was built on, July 2026: one expiry page carrying 376 assets, 141 subcontractor certificates, 84 accreditations, 80 health assessments, 55 instruments and 9 vehicles.
Cable and drums
Containment
Accessories
Distribution
Lighting
Fire and life safety
Test instruments
The certificates
The week
An ordinary week, and the record it leaves.
Six entries from a electrical firm's day book. Nothing here asks anybody to remember something at five o'clock on a Friday.
Monday, first fix
Four drums go out against the job as a movement, and the part drums coming back are booked in as their own item, so the consumption is visible in job costing.
Waste made visible
In the van
The multifunction tester carries its calibration date on the register the certificates draw from, so it turns amber before it goes out of date.
Flagged before it lapses
Wednesday
A condition report is carried out on site and finished on the phone where the observations were made. It is a certificate the moment it is saved.
Issued on the day
At the gate
The principal contractor asks for cards and grading for four operatives and the scheme registration. All of it comes off one page, in date.
Second fix starts
Day thirty one
The domestic board change carries its completion date and its notification window, and the reminder page flagged it before the window closed.
Notified in time
Year five
A client asks for the certificate for a distribution board. It is retrieved by the job, with the audit trail on the document.
Found in minutes
What it must do
Eight requirements, and an honest answer to each.
One thing to settle first, because it decides whether the rest is worth reading: Unibuild does not produce BS 7671 certificates. It runs the business around them. The limits section below is unusually important on this page.
Test instruments watched, not remembered
This is the strongest single fit for your trade. Each instrument is held as its own record with make, model, serial number and calibration history, and compliance and certification already runs a calibration register alongside portable appliance testing. Reminders and expiry turns a date red before it passes, so a tester goes for calibration before certificates are issued on it rather than afterwards.
Cards and grading, provable at the gate
The training matrix holds every card and qualification per person and turns it red before it lapses. It holds the grade rather than the trade, which is what actually gets asked here: not whether somebody is an electrician, but whether they are an approved electrician, and therefore what they may be priced at and what they may sign.
Certificates findable in year five
Documents and certificates issues 58 document types on your own letterhead and holds them against the job and the client, so a request five years later is a search rather than an archaeology exercise. Certificates produced in your certification app can be held here too, which is usually the practical arrangement: produced there, stored where the rest of the client's history lives.
Observations recorded where they are found
The field app carries 24 modules on the phone, granted per person, and project and site management holds the site diary and dated photographs against the job. A defect photographed at the board with a note attached is a record made once, rather than a notepad photograph transcribed on Saturday morning.
Cable and materials booked against the job
Assets and inventory holds stock against bin locations with an append only ledger, and picking posts the movement rather than leaving a second job to forget. On a trade where four drums go to a floor and an unknown amount comes back, this is where the margin quietly lives, and it feeds cost control so the job costing sees the materials.
Safe isolation and the method, signed by the person doing it
RAMS are signed at the gate against a frozen version by the operative doing the work, and health and safety carries permits, including the isolation permit, plus COSHH and near miss reporting. See the permits to work guide for how a permit regime is meant to hang together.
Many small jobs rather than one long site
The labour run planner puts every person against every job weeks ahead, which suits a week made of eleven visits. Where is everybody shows who has scanned in on a live map, and workforce and time puts hours against the job rather than the week, so labour cost per job is a number rather than an allocation.
Governing clauseThe dates that matter here expire whether anyone is watching or not, so something should watch them.
Site noticeWhere it stops
Four things Unibuild does not do today.
Every one of these has been asked for by an electrical firm on a demonstration. They are published here rather than discovered in week three.
It does not produce BS 7671 certificates
The important one, and the reason it is first. There is no installation certificate, minor works or condition report engine, no schedule of test results, and no model forms. Keep the certification app you already use. Unibuild runs the business around the certificates rather than producing them.
Test results as structured data
Readings are not fields. Loop impedance, insulation resistance and RCD times live in your certification software, and the finished certificate is held here as a document against the job and the client. Nothing trends your readings or compares this year's report to the last one.
Scheme notification
No integration with a competent person scheme and no automatic building control notification. The platform can hold the job and remind you a date is approaching, but the notification itself happens where it happens today, and that stays a person's responsibility.
Design and calculation
No cable sizing, no volt drop, no maximum Zs lookups, no lighting design. Estimating prices measured work from a dated library of materials, labour and fit times. The engineering stays in the tools built for it.
Why this is hereHiding the gaps wastes both our afternoons. Ask about all four.
The yard
Materials schedule
Written for the trade rather than for any one firm. Most electrical contractors will recognise eight or nine of these lines and ignore the rest.
What a UK electrical contractor holds, and the tracking quirk in each line
Key
Category
Typical items
The tracking quirk
Cable
Twin and earth, singles, SWA, FP, data, drums and part drums
Issued by the drum and consumed by the metre, so a part drum returning is where the costing is won or lost
Portable appliance testing, vibration magnitudes, and a named current holder
Access
Steps, podiums, towers, MEWPs
Inspection intervals that apply whether the ladder is in a van or a store
The certificates
Installation certificates, minor works, condition reports, commissioning records
No physical existence, the actual product, and the thing most often stored worst
Regulations
The regimes you work under
Everything below is a description of the landscape you already know, written so an answer engine quoting one line of it is still correct. It is not technical advice.
What each regime asks of a electrical contractor
Regime
What it requires
BS 7671, the wiring regulations
The national standard for electrical installation in the United Kingdom, maintained jointly by the IET and BSI and revised by amendment rather than replaced. It is not itself statute, but compliance with it is the accepted route to demonstrating that an installation meets the legal requirement to be safe, which is why certification refers to it by name.
The three certificates
An Electrical Installation Certificate covers new installation work and confirms it complies with the standard. A Minor Electrical Installation Works Certificate covers additions and alterations that do not include a new circuit. An Electrical Installation Condition Report is a periodic inspection of an existing installation, recording observations and a classification against each. Between them they cover almost all work a contractor issues.
Part P and competent person schemes
Notifiable domestic work in England and Wales has to reach building control. The usual route is membership of a government approved competent person scheme, which lets a contractor self certify: the scheme notifies building control and the householder receives a building regulations compliance certificate. Membership is what makes self certification lawful, which is why a lapsed registration is a commercial emergency rather than an administrative one.
Scheme assessment
Registration is reassessed on a cycle rather than granted once. An assessment looks at a sample of completed work, the certificates and records behind it, the test instruments and their calibration, and the competence of the people signing. In practice the assessment is conducted on the quality of your record keeping as much as on the quality of your installations.
Test instrument calibration
Every measurement an instrument takes is the basis of a safety decision, such as whether a circuit disconnects fast enough under fault conditions. The instrument's make, model and serial number are recorded against the certification, and a copy of its calibration certificate is routinely supplied with a condition report. An instrument found to be out of calibration casts doubt over the certificates issued on its readings, not just over the next one.
The Electricity at Work Regulations 1989
The statutory duty behind safe isolation: work on or near conductors must be carried out dead unless it is unreasonable in all the circumstances for it to be so. The practical control is a proving sequence with an approved voltage indicator and a proving unit, and test leads that meet the published guidance on their design. This is also the regulation behind portable appliance testing.
Competence: cards and grading
The electrotechnical card scheme records a grade rather than a trade, distinguishing apprentice, electrician, approved electrician and technician levels, and the industry grading underpins both the rate a person is priced at and what they may reasonably put their name to. A principal contractor asking for competence on this trade is usually asking for the grade.
Adjacent schemes
Several strands of the work carry their own certification entirely separate from the main registration: fire detection and emergency lighting under their own British Standards with commissioning and periodic testing records, renewables under a microgeneration scheme, structured cabling under manufacturer warranty schemes, and chargepoint installation under its own approvals. Each is a separate register of accreditations that expires on its own timetable.
Questions
Requests for information
The questions electrical firms actually raise on a demonstration, answered on the record. Open one to read the response.
The marketDoes it produce EICs and condition reports?+
No. There is no certificate engine, no schedule of test results and no model forms, and we would rather lead with that than bury it. Keep the certification app you already run, because it does that job properly. What Unibuild does is everything around it: the instruments and their calibration dates, the cards and grading of the people signing, the materials against the job, the money, and a place the finished certificates live alongside the rest of that client's history.
CertificationWhat software do UK electrical contractors use?+
Nearly always two things at least: a certification package for the certificates and test results, and something else for jobs, people and money, which is usually a spreadsheet plus an accounts package. The certification side of the market is mature and specialised. The business side is where most firms are running on habit. Unibuild is the second of those, which is why it sits beside your certification app rather than trying to replace it.
CalibrationHow does it help with test instrument calibration?+
Each instrument is held as its own record with make, model, serial number and full calibration history, in the same calibration register the platform already runs for other equipment. A due date turns red before it passes rather than after, which is the whole point: an instrument found out of calibration casts doubt over every certificate issued on its readings since, not just the next one. For most firms this alone justifies the exercise.
NotificationCan it track ECS cards and grading?+
Yes, and it holds the grade rather than a general competence flag, which matters here more than in most trades. Apprentice, electrician, approved electrician and technician are four different answers to what someone is priced at and what they may sign. The grid turns a card red before it lapses, so the answer to a principal contractor asking for competence on four operatives is a screen rather than a morning.
AdoptionWill it remind us about Part P notifications?+
It can hold the job and flag that a date is approaching, but it does not notify anybody and has no integration with a competent person scheme. The notification happens exactly where it happens today. Being plain about it: this reduces the chance of a job being forgotten, and it does not remove the need for a named person who owns notification as a task.
GradingWe do maintenance as well as installation. Which page is us?+
This page is written for contracting: installation, certification, projects and the commercial side. If most of your work is planned and reactive maintenance across a portfolio, with engineers on call, appliance level records and gas or air conditioning alongside the electrical work, the M and E contractors page is the closer fit and covers safe isolation permits and appliance level compliance in more depth. Plenty of firms are genuinely both, in which case read the two together and we will pick the modules to match on the call.
Cable wasteCan it stop cable waste disappearing into the job?+
Partly, and honestly it depends on habits on site more than on software. Drums are issued against the job as a movement, and part drums coming back are booked in as their own item, which is what makes the consumption visible in job costing. What no system does is make somebody record a part drum at five o'clock on a Friday. The realistic gain is at the drum level, not the metre level, and that is usually enough to change the picture.
PricingWhere do our certificates actually live?+
Against the job and against the client, so a request in year five is a search. The usual arrangement is that certificates are produced in your certification package and held in Unibuild alongside the quotation, the variations, the photographs, the invoices and the correspondence for that client. That is the practical difference: not a better certificate, but one that is still findable when the person who issued it has left.
MaintenanceWill electricians actually use it?+
Only if what you ask of them is small. Three things on the phone: clock in, the method or isolation signature, and materials or photographs against the job. Everything else stays with the office. Permissions are granted per person, so that is configuration rather than compromise. Electricians are generally more comfortable with a phone than most trades, but that is not a reason to ask more of them in month one.
RolloutHow is it priced, and do you charge per electrician?+
Users are unlimited and the price does not change when you take apprentices or extra operatives on. There is no published rate card, because a six person firm running two modules and a fifty person firm running twenty are not the same product. Pricing is worked out against the size and shape of the business on the demonstration. There is a 14 day free trial on your own data first, and migration of your existing people, instrument and client records is done for you.
Half an hour, on your own jobs and your own people. Bring your test instrument list and we will set it up in front of you. We will tell you plainly which half of your problem this solves and which half stays with your certification app.
