The jobs people actually ask us to fix.

You measure up on Tuesday. The quote goes out on Sunday night at the kitchen table, after the kids are down. Prices come from a supplier email, a PDF and the last job that looked a bit like this one. By the time it lands, the customer has two other quotes and has stopped caring about yours.

A draft can be built from the job record while the details are still fresh – the site notes, the photos, the measurements, the line items you used on the last six jobs of this type. It arrives in ServiceM8 or Simpro as a draft and you check it on your phone in the van. The checking is real work. It is also much shorter than the writing.

Be careful what you pay for here. ServiceM8 already ships an AI writing helper and an auto-invoice feature, and its own published figure is that over 30% of auto-invoice drafts are accepted as they are. servicem8.com ↗ Read that the other way. About seven in ten still get edited by a person. That is the honest state of AI drafting, from a vendor, about software you may already own.

The pricing half is often solved too. AroFlo lists nine integrated Australian wholesalers, including Reece, Rexel and MM Electrical, with live account pricing, ordering and supplier invoice matching. aroflo.com ↗ Simpro imports supplier catalogues automatically. helpguide.simprogroup.com ↗ If you are on either of those, we will not sell you a price-list reader you already have.

What is worth building is the shape of your quotes, which is the part no vendor knows. One trade, one quote type, one system is the one-workflow rung on the pricing page: A$9,000, fixed, excluding GST. A second system moves it up a rung.

You are under a sink with both hands wet. By knock-off there are nine missed calls and no way to tell which one was worth chasing. The good ones go cold overnight.

Somebody will show you a number here. Missed calls cost Australian tradies fifty-odd thousand a year, or seven in ten callers never ring back. We went looking for the primary source behind those figures and could not find one. They trace back to vendor blogs quoting each other. We would rather count a month of your real calls off your real phone records and tell you what your own number is.

What works is well understood. An assistant answers, works out what the caller wants, books the job or takes a message, and sends you a plain-English summary. We know this one closely, because we run one. Lomandra is ours.

Most of the time we will tell you to buy this rather than build it. ServiceM8 sells a phone agent on its own phone plans that answers common questions, saves messages to your ServiceM8 inbox, books on the caller's behalf, transfers to a human and screens sales calls. support.servicem8.com ↗ If that covers you, buy that.

Two limits are worth stating plainly. The first is capacity. ServiceTitan, which runs voice agents at scale in the United States, publishes booking rates between 70% and 90% and says the constraint is how much room is left in the schedule. servicetitan.com ↗ A published customer story on that platform reports roughly one call in three still going to a person. servicetitan.com ↗ Those are American home-services businesses, not Australian ones, and we will keep saying so until we have an Australian number of our own.

The second is audio, and here we are speaking from running a phone product rather than from a study. A caller in a ute on a motorway, reading out a part number, over a mobile network, is close to the worst input a speech model gets. Test on real recorded calls from your own business before go-live. Anything else is guessing.

Configuration, the greeting, the booking rules and the link to your diary is usually the one-workflow rung. If the answer is to buy an add-on, you will get that on the first call and it costs you nothing.

The job is booked over the phone and written on a pad. Someone types it into ServiceM8. At month end it is typed again into Xero, and once more into a spreadsheet the bookkeeper keeps. Every retype is a chance to get a number wrong, and every wrong number costs an hour to find.

Most of this work is ordinary integration. It is predictable, it is testable, and it does not make things up. ServiceM8 publishes a REST API from its A$29 a month Starter plan, with webhooks on jobs, payments, notes, materials and form responses. servicem8.com ↗ developer.servicem8.com ↗ MYOB publishes a business API covering contacts, invoices, bills, payments and payroll. developer.myob.com ↗ Deputy documents webhooks on events such as a timesheet update. developer.deputy.com ↗ Employment Hero publishes API references including rostered shifts and webhook configuration. developer.employmenthero.com ↗

Now the part the brochures leave out. A ServiceM8 webhook tells you a record changed and does not tell you what it changed to, so every notification means a second call to read the record back. developer.servicem8.com ↗ Xero publishes a daily cap on API calls per organisation. developer.xero.com ↗ Where a system sends no event for the thing you care about, the only option is polling on a schedule, and that cap decides how often you can poll. MYOB desktop company files need their own username and password on top of the login, and MYOB deprecated the legacy company-file scope for new keys in March 2025. apisupport.myob.com ↗

Tradify is the one to check early. We can find no public developer documentation and no developer portal for it. If that is your system, assume there is no clean way in, and the work becomes email and document handling instead. You will hear that on the first call, not after you have paid for two weeks of looking.

If you run an SMSF or accounting practice on Class Super or BGL, the question is the same one. What will the vendor let you read, what will it let you write, and how often. We answer that in writing before anyone quotes you a build.

One hop between two systems is the one-workflow rung at A$9,000 excluding GST. Three or four systems with a real reconciliation between them is the implementation sprint above it, because the time goes into the failure cases and not the happy path.

Sarah has been there eleven years. She knows which supplier will do a Saturday delivery, which client wants the invoice split across two entities, and where the 2019 variation letter went. When Sarah takes leave, everything takes longer and nobody can point at the reason.

An assistant can answer from your own documents and show its working. Every answer comes back with a link to the paragraph it came from, so whoever asked can check it in ten seconds. That citation is the whole design. An assistant that answers without showing where the answer came from is worse than the folder it replaced, because now the mistake looks official.

Two limits, both boring and both real. It answers just as confidently when your own documents disagree, and most businesses have four versions of the same price list. Sorting that out is most of the cost. It also goes stale: a document set nobody curates becomes a wrong answer with a tidy interface, about six months in.

There is a legal edge here too. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner recommends organisations do not enter personal information, and particularly sensitive information, into publicly available generative AI tools. oaic.gov.au ↗ That is the difference between a built system running on your own credentials and someone in accounts pasting a client file into a browser tab.

One team, one document set, one place people ask: the one-workflow rung. Across a whole business, with the tidying, it is a sprint. Keeping it current afterwards is most of what the monthly retainer actually buys.

The job finished on Thursday. The certificate goes in the following Wednesday, if someone remembers. The safe work method statement gets written the night before, from a template, with the site name changed.

New South Wales electrical work is the clearest example in the country right now. Since 1 July 2026, certificates of compliance for electrical work must be submitted through the Building Commission NSW eCert portal, and handwritten and PDF forms are no longer accepted. Gasfitters and medical gasfitters moved on 1 March 2026. nsw.gov.au ↗ There is a public API, with a downloadable specification, so a job management system can lodge straight from the job record. nsw.gov.au ↗

The data already sits in ServiceM8, Simpro or AroFlo. The regulator wants it in a particular shape, within seven days of the test. Building the bridge between those two is the most legible piece of AI work we know of for a NSW electrical contractor: the job closes, a draft certificate is assembled from the job notes, photos and forms, the licensee reads it on their phone, and it lodges.

Three limits. The API is fussy – roughly a hundred fields, licence numbers checked against the licence holder's name, strict picklists, and an allowlist for your server's address. Batch submissions do not hand back their errors on the spot; they arrive later as a CSV by email, which changes how the whole thing has to be built. And your business has to be approved by the Building Commission before it can use the API at all. nsw.gov.au ↗

Only a licensed electrician can sign. Software drafts, the licensee reads and signs, every time. Anyone offering you the other arrangement is selling you a problem with a penalty attached.

The same rule holds for safe work method statements. The law requires a statement prepared for that workplace, in consultation with the people doing the work. safeworkaustralia.gov.au ↗ A generically generated SWMS is arguably non-compliant the moment it prints. What can honestly be built is a draft from the job data and the site photos, with the consultation recorded and signed by someone who was there. Safe Work Australia publishes free templates, so nobody should be paying anyone for those.

Receipts and invoices are the quiet one. The ATO requires most business records to be kept for five years, and accepts digital copies where they are a true and clear reproduction of the original. ato.gov.au ↗ Capture and coding is a five-year obligation with an audit at the end of it.

Work that faces a regulator is an implementation sprint, A$12,000 to A$28,000 excluding GST. It needs a test harness and a written plan for what happens when a lodgement fails at 4pm on day seven.

The work is finished and the invoice is out. Then nothing. You send a polite email. Two weeks later you send another one. Meanwhile the wages run and the supplier account falls due.

The numbers behind this are public. The Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman reports that only three in ten big businesses pay their small business customers within 30 days, and nearly a quarter take more than 120 days. asbfeo.gov.au ↗ ASIC's insolvency data puts construction at the top of the list: 2,975 companies entering external administration in 2023–24, 27% of the national total. asic.gov.au ↗

What can honestly be automated is the schedule and the wording. Reminders drafted off the ledger, in your voice, at sensible intervals, with the awkward ones held back for you to read. One person approves the week's list in five minutes.

Check the obvious thing first. Automatic invoice reminders are a standard feature in accounting software and plenty of businesses have never switched them on. If that is your situation, we will say so and there is nothing to buy.

The other limit is human. No software makes a customer pay. And the account you most need to chase is usually the one you least want to annoy, which is a judgement call and should stay with a person who knows the relationship.

Where this is worth building it is the one-workflow rung, A$9,000 excluding GST. Often it is a settings change and half an hour of your time.

Every engagement is fixed price and fixed scope, in Australian dollars, excluding GST. The rungs named above are two weeks of looking at A$4,500, one workflow built and connected at A$9,000, and an implementation sprint above that for work spanning several systems. Each one is set out with its scope, and what is deliberately left out of it, on the pricing page.

Under twenty people, skip the two weeks of looking. One call, then a fixed quote for one workflow. If none of the six problems above is costing you enough to justify a build, you will hear that on the call and it costs you nothing.