An electrician's estimate book is a strange mix. On Monday you price an EICR at £180; on Tuesday a consumer-unit upgrade at £650; on Wednesday a full rewire at £6,500. Three estimates, three completely different buying decisions — and if you chase them all the same way, or more likely chase none of them, you are leaving booked work on the table. Here is how sparks running QuickBooks Online get follow-up right without adding office hours.
Small fast jobs and big slow ones need different chases
The single biggest follow-up mistake in electrical work is using one cadence for everything.
EICRs and small works: chase fast, close fast
A landlord who needs an EICR needs it now — there is a tenancy renewal or a compliance deadline behind the enquiry, and in England landlords are legally required to hold a satisfactory report, as set out in the government's electrical safety guidance. These estimates are decided in days. Follow up at 24 hours, again at 72, and after a week send one final message and move on. Speed wins this work; a week-old unchased EICR estimate is already someone else's job.
Consumer-unit upgrades: the middle ground
A board change is often semi-urgent — flagged on an EICR, or a nervous homeowner with a fizzing fuse box. A few days of comparison shopping is normal. Check in at day three, add something useful at day ten (why an SPD matters, what the day looks like for them), and nudge before the estimate expires.
Rewires: play the long game
A rewire is disruptive, expensive and usually tangled up with a wider renovation. Decision cycles run one to three months. Here the cadence stretches right out: helpful, well-spaced touches every couple of weeks, keyed to their project timeline rather than yours. The general shape is in our guide to follow-up cadence — the electrician-specific insight is that you need all three cadences running simultaneously, which is precisely why it never happens manually.
Estimates sent from the van deserve follow-up from the cloud
Most electricians now price small works on the doorstep: QuickBooks app open, estimate built in the van, sent before leaving the street. Excellent practice — the estimate arrives while the visit is still fresh. But the van is also where follow-up dies. You send it, drive to the next job, and never think about it again until you stumble across a stack of Pending estimates at VAT time.
This is the gap Quote Nudge QB closes. It watches your QuickBooks Online account, and the moment an estimate is sent it starts an automated follow-up sequence — from your own email domain with proper DKIM, so it lands looking like you, not a mailing platform. It is idempotent, so nobody ever gets chased twice, and every sequence stops instantly when the customer accepts, declines or the estimate closes. You price the job in the van; the follow-up runs itself from then on.
Deposits before you book out multi-day work
For an EICR, payment on completion is fine. For a rewire, it is a liability. Blocking out a week in the diary and buying cable, back boxes and a consumer unit on a verbal yes means one wobbly customer can blow a hole in your month. The professional standard for multi-day work is a deposit at acceptance — and making that deposit effortless to pay is what separates "I'll sort a bank transfer this week" from money actually landing.
With Quote Nudge QB, acceptance and deposit are one step. The customer opens the branded acceptance page from a follow-up email, e-signs the estimate — which flips it to Accepted in QuickBooks automatically — and pays your chosen percentage deposit straight into your own Stripe account. Two minutes on their phone, and your week of labour is secured before you order a metre of twin-and-earth.
See which estimates are alive
The other thing electricians lack is visibility. Which of the fourteen open estimates has even been read? Quote Nudge QB tracks every estimate through sent, viewed and accepted, so a glance tells you who is engaged and who has gone dark. An estimate viewed four times this week deserves a phone call — that customer is deciding right now. One never opened at all needs a different approach entirely, and possibly a text. And when you do call, keep it helpful rather than heavy; the tone that works is in how to follow up without being pushy.
- Never viewed: the email missed — call or text, do not resend the same message.
- Viewed once, silent: normal comparison shopping — let the sequence run.
- Viewed repeatedly: hot — ring them today.
Quote Nudge QB launches soon for QuickBooks Online at £16.79 a month, with a 14-day free trial and no card needed. Price the work, send it from the van, and let the follow-up chase itself — join the waitlist at quotenudge-qb.mcp-g.com.