CONTROLQORE FOR ELECTRICAL CONTRACTORS.
Generic accounting software can't read labor cost per phase while rough-in is still open, hold a copper escalation clause against the bid basis it was priced on, or keep service work out of the construction P&L. ControlQore can.
ControlQore for electrical contractors uses cost codes by phase, meaning temporary power, feeders and distribution, branch rough-in by area, gear set, devices and trim-out, and testing. Labor cost per phase is compared weekly to the estimated rate from the bid, long-lead gear deposits and stored material carry their own codes, and service work runs as its own division against construction. The WIP schedule is produced monthly from cost-to-cost percentage complete, and every lien and bond claim deadline is calendared the day the contract signs.
The difference isn't the report list. It's when you find out. Electrical puts wire and labor in the wall at rough-in and bills the finish months later, so a P&L that reads fine in March is describing a job whose real cost was set in January. Cost codes cut to phase turn the same crew hours into a rate per phase you can hold against the bid in week two. Week two is early enough to add a man, change the method, or write the change order while the superintendent still remembers what happened.
THE NUMBERS GENERIC SOFTWARE MISSES.
WHAT IT IS.
ControlQore is a job costing and WIP platform for commercial subcontractors at $1M to $12M that tracks cost by job and cost code, so an electrical contractor can read labor cost per phase, rough-in separately from trim-out, while the rough-in crew is still in the building.
Electrical carries the strongest margins of the trades on this site and still nets 7.5 percent at $1M to $5M against a CFOS target of 11 percent, stated before taxes. That distance isn't a pricing problem in this trade. It sits in the phases nobody measures separately, in the middle of the job where the cash gets carried, and in receivables that age past the point where anyone remembers the work well enough to argue about it.
Overhead is the other half of it. Electrical overhead runs 16 percent of revenue at $1M to $5M, the heaviest of the trades here, because vehicles, lifts, and tooling live in overhead and not in equipment cost on a job. The CFOS overhead target at that band is 15 percent. Reading that number correctly means knowing what belongs to service and what belongs to construction, which is a cost code decision before it's a management decision.
WHERE IT GOES WRONG.
No Labor Cost Per Phase Until Closeout
QuickBooks job tracking gives you one labor total for the job. It can't tell you what branch rough-in on the third floor cost last week against the rate you bid that phase at. Electrical gross margin at $1M to $5M averages 25 percent and the CFOS target is 26 percent, so one point of drift on rough-in labor is the whole difference between the two. A blended job total hides that point behind the phases that came out fine, and it keeps hiding it until the last device is trimmed and the money is already spent.
The Rough-In Desert Is Financed by You
Electrical front-loads labor and wire at rough-in, then waits through every other trade before trim-out and final billing. The middle of the job is a cash desert: the cost is in the wall and the billing milestones are still months out. Retainage holds another 5 to 10 percent behind that, and it presses harder on electrical than on most trades because the labor went in first. Without stored-material billing and a front-loaded schedule of values, the contractor carries the middle of every job out of working capital.
Copper and Gear Bid on Last Year's Numbers
Copper traded at $5.92 per pound in May 2026, up 24.75 percent year over year, with a 50 percent copper tariff in effect since August 2025 and a projected global deficit near 150,000 tons. Gear is worse than the wire. Panels quote at 16 weeks or more, medium-voltage gear is effectively sold out through 2028 in many channels, and transformers quote around 128 weeks. A fixed-price bid signed with no escalation clause and no date-stamped basis is an unhedged commodity position, and OEM deposits of 10 to 30 percent leave the account years before the gear ever bills.
Service and Construction Inside One P&L
Service work runs high-margin small tickets. Construction runs low-margin large contracts on GC paper. Blended books hide which side is feeding the other, so the owner prices both wrong: service gets bid like construction and construction gets bid like service. Electrical overhead runs 16 percent of revenue at $1M to $5M, the heaviest of the trades on this site, because vehicles, lifts, and tooling all sit in overhead rather than in job equipment cost. One blended rate across both divisions loads that overhead onto the wrong work.
Receivables Sitting at 120 Days
Pay-when-paid pushes the wait downstream and electrical wears it, because the labor went in before anybody else's. Lien and bond claim deadlines get missed when nobody calendars them at signing. Retainage disappears into the same AR bucket as current billing, so nothing tells you what's held versus what's late. Collections happen when the owner gets angry rather than on a cadence. That's how an electrical receivable reaches 120 days, and a receivable at 120 days is a loan you're making to a GC at zero percent.
WHAT WE BUILD.
SPM builds ControlQore cost codes for electrical clients by phase: temporary power, feeders and distribution, branch rough-in by area or floor, gear set, devices and trim-out, testing, and punch. Each code points at the matching category in the estimate, so labor, material, and equipment post where the bid was built. A foreman logging hours at the end of the day is filling the same bucket the estimator priced. That's what makes the comparison of actual against estimated direct instead of reconstructed three months later.
Actual burdened labor cost per phase is compared weekly to the estimated rate from the bid. Any phase running more than 10 percent over estimate for two consecutive weeks gets flagged for review, and the cause is identifiable in the cost code detail and not in a feeling about the job. The conversation becomes branch rough-in on one floor at one crew size, which is something a superintendent can act on this week. The same conversation at closeout is a post-mortem.
Long-lead gear carries its own cost codes and its own billing path. Deposits of 10 to 30 percent post as prepaid gear or stored material instead of vanishing into a job total, so you can see how much of your cash is sitting in an OEM production slot and not in the bank. On the bid side, escalation and tariff language goes into the estimating routine: index the clause to a published copper reference, date-stamp the basis, and treat buyout timing as a decision with a cash cost. Any fixed-price work crossing more than a quarter gets the clause.
SPM sets service and construction up as divisions in ControlQore, each with its own P&L, its own overhead allocation, and its own margin reporting. Service tickets roll up by customer and by tech. Construction jobs roll up by GC. You see which division is carrying the company, what each one earns after the overhead it genuinely absorbs, and whether the service truck is funding a GC who pays at 120 days. Both divisions then get priced from their own numbers.
On public work, fully burdened rates by classification get built before the bid goes out rather than after an audit finds the error. Fringe handling and classification mapping are set once, certified payroll runs weekly against those classifications, and job costing carries the burdened rate so one Davis-Bacon job stays comparable to the next one. SPM structures and reconciles the rates and the reporting; payroll processing itself stays with your payroll provider. Misclassification claws margin back retroactively, which is why the rate discipline comes before the filing.
Every lien and bond claim deadline is calendared the day the contract signs. Retainage is tracked as its own class instead of blended into current AR, so you know what's held, what's late, and when each piece releases. Collections run on a fixed cadence with clean waivers and on-time billing behind them. The WIP schedule is produced monthly from cost-to-cost percentage complete, and it goes out in a form a bonding agent or a banker can read without a cleanup pass first.
THE OUTPUTS, LISTED.
FLAT MONTHLY FEE. NO SOFTWARE INVOICE.
Three tiers, priced by your trailing twelve month revenue. ControlQore comes with Strategic, and it never appears as its own line item on an SPM invoice. Which tier you're in depends on how much of the work you want off your desk.
Pricing
| Last 12 months revenue | Monthly fee |
|---|---|
| Up to $1M | $1,900 to $2,900 |
| $1M to $3.5M | $2,600 to $3,900 |
| $3.5M to $6.5M | $3,800 to $5,700 |
| $6.5M to $9.5M | $5,100 to $7,100 |
| $9.5M to $12.5M | $6,100 to $8,500 |
| $12.5M to $15.5M | $7,400 to $11,000 |
| $15.5M to $18.5M | $9,400 to $13,500 |
| $18.5M+ | Quoted individually |
Range reflects the three tiers below. Which one you're in depends on how much of the work you want off your desk. No payroll. No hidden line items.
You stop guessing.
You get the CFO work. Job costing built against the way you estimate, a 13 week cash forecast, monthly WIP, and a meeting every month that ends in decisions rather than a report.
Your bookkeeper keeps doing the books.
You stop touching the books.
Everything in Core, and we run the bookkeeping and the controllership as well. Nobody in your office is answering coding questions or chasing a reconciliation at month end.
We do the books. No payroll.
Every job shows its margin while it's still running.
Everything in Executive, plus the job costing and WIP platform set up, loaded with your cost codes, and managed for you every month. You never have to learn it.
We do the job costing.
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