One van became sixteen. 12 hours saved every month.
How MSE Electrical swapped a three-hour daily paper chase for one dashboard the whole business runs on.
The challenge
MSE Electrical started the way a lot of trades do: one man, one van, and a lot of hours. That first van cost £700. The work never slowed down, so Jonathan kept taking on people and buying vans, two, four, six. Six vans was where it stopped being simple. He’s always reinvested straight back into the business, and by the time the crew reached 16 to 18 people, the old way of running things had stopped working. Every day, Ross in the office would go through vehicle trackers and vans just to piece together when the guys had arrived on site and when they’d left. That could eat up three hours on its own.
The solution
It was a ChatGPT search that pointed Jonathan towards SymTerra, an increasingly familiar way for people to find software these days. A Teams call with Sarah confirmed it was the right fit: an M&E background, and a system built for a business their size rather than a big corporate rollout. “It’s more geared towards us without bringing in the big corporate stuff,” Jonathan says. “You’re geo‑tagged, you’re swiping in, swiping out, that’s not what we want.” He asked for one thing: an overview of everything. He had a custom dashboard built for him within a couple of days. Now the crew submit timesheets and site photos through SymTerra as they go, a daily digest email is the first thing the office checks each morning, and Ross can see exactly how many hours went into each job, so margins finally get tracked properly.
“You don’t want to show a customer a WhatsApp group. You want to show them the system you’re using, how the mainframe of your business works, and SymTerra allows us to do that.”
The results
of office admin time saved a month
strong crew, up from one van
to send a client a full job report
About MSE Electrical
MSE Electrical Services is a commercial electrical contractor based in Hillington, Glasgow. NICEIC registered, the team covers everything from new installations and rewires to lighting design, power distribution, data cabling and energy efficiency work, for clients across the commercial, industrial and healthcare sectors.
Jonathan has reinvested straight back into the business since that first £700 van, and it shows in how the team talks about its own work. “From the big things we produce on site to the corners of the office, we take great care, pride and passion in everything we do,” he says. It’s also why he wants people to stay: “We want to be the team where, once somebody joins, they don’t think about going anywhere else.”
Want Results Like MSE Electrical's?
See how SymTerra can give your growing team one dashboard for timesheets, site photos and daily reporting, instead of hours spent chasing trackers and paperwork.