ElectricalBossPro Blog — Commercial Accounts

Office Building Electrical Work: Suites, Floors and the Front Desk in One Record

Office buildings are quiet work compared with restaurants and gyms, but they come with their own rules. There is a front desk or security station, a building engineer who holds the keys, tenants in suites who do not want to be disturbed, and an owner or management company who pays for the common areas while tenants sometimes pay for their own spaces. Getting all of that straight is most of the job.

From Restaurants to Offices

Timing work around a business's busy hours was the subject of Restaurant Electrical Accounts: Working Around Service Hours at Every Location. Offices are usually easier on timing, since nights and weekends are often wide open, but harder on access and on keeping track of who is responsible for what.

Setting Up the Building

In ElectricalBossPro the building owner or management company is the client. Then you add addresses for the places your techs go. For a small office building, that might be one address for the building itself. For a larger one, you might add:

• The building, for the main service, common-area lighting and the electrical rooms.
• Individual suites (“Suite 300”) where you do tenant work billed to the owner.
• The parking garage or lot, if lighting there is on a maintenance plan.

If a tenant hires you directly for work in their own suite, they can be their own client with their own address, so their bill never lands on the owner's statement. Tags make it easy to see which clients belong to which building.

The Front Desk and the Building Engineer

Office access runs through people. Security wants a name. The building engineer wants a heads-up. The electrical room on the fourth floor needs a key that lives in the engineer's office. All of that goes in the access notes on the address:

• “Sign in at the lobby desk, ask for the building engineer.”
• “Electrical rooms on each floor, keys in the engineering office, basement level.”
• “Use the freight elevator for ladders and materials.”
• “Suite 300 work after 6pm only, tenant is on calls all day.”

The tech sees those notes on the job card before they leave the van. The access note system is covered in depth in Electrical Room Keys and Front Desk Check-Ins: Access Notes for Commercial Electrical Jobs.

Equipment Floor by Floor

Office buildings often have a main service, a main panel or switchboard area, and panels on each floor or in each suite. Each address can keep its own equipment list, with brand, model, serial, year installed, rating, phase, location and access notes. A note like “Subpanel · 4th floor electrical room · north end, key from engineering” turns a twenty-minute search into a two-minute walk.

New jobs at that address can pull from the list with the From House picker. Anything the tech updates goes back to the address record for next time.

Night and Weekend Work

Offices are one of the easiest places to do after-hours work, because most tenants are gone. The office puts the job on the right day and van on the dispatch board, writes the timing in the notes, and orders the route so the office building comes after the day's other stops. Crew GPS on the office map shows where the tech is, and the time clock records the hours.

Who Pays for What

An office building can generate several kinds of work in one month: common-area lighting, a breaker issue in the electrical room, a few new outlets in a suite the owner is preparing for a new tenant. If the owner pays for all of it, set the client to Monthly and every job rolls onto one statement, each line labeled by address. The owner or manager can see exactly which suite or common area each charge belongs to.

If a suite tenant pays for their own work, keep them as their own client and bill them per job with a card on file. Nothing gets mixed up between accounts.

Reports for the Owner

Building owners often want to know the condition of their electrical system without reading a technician's notes. When a tech fills in the safety inspection checklist on the phone, with readings, a condition and recommendations, the office can print an Electrical Safety Inspection report for the owner. It is a simple way to show the building is being looked after.

Building the Office Account

Office work rewards electricians who know the building and respect the tenants. Addresses for each space, clear access notes and clean statements are the foundation. For how this connects with monthly billing, relamping and the rest of the commercial features, see the commercial electrical software overview.