About us

We do electrical work only

elektro.box is business software for Swiss electrical contractors — for new build, service, inspection and solar PV. We do not serve other trades. That is not modesty, it is the decision everything else hangs on.

Where this came from

Built because we needed it ourselves

Phillipe Wigger took over his father's electrical contracting business in Oerlikon and set out to digitise it properly. So they added everything the existing trade software offered: modules, digital capture, more features. Less paper, less administration, simpler working — that was the idea.

Looking closely at their own processes, the answer was clear: more digital yes, simpler no. In places, the opposite.

One example from the working day

Bookkeeping was scanning a QR code off the computer screen with an iPhone in order to pay an invoice. Everything had been digitised — and still someone was photographing a screen to keep a digital process moving.

Where the office hours go

  • Looking for information and carrying data from one place to another.
  • Opening jobs, writing and checking job reports, producing invoices.
  • Hunting for safety verification certificates, working through defects, filing documents.
  • And entering, again and again, something that is already written down somewhere.

Looked for it, did not find it, built it

What was wanted was not software with as many modules as possible, but software that understands how an electrical contractor actually works: simple, fast, dependable. It was not to be found. So he teamed up with Patrick Lauber — and rather than stopping at their own experience, the two of them talked to a lot of people in the trade and looked at where the time in a business really goes.

«Why should a person enter something twice when the system already knows it?»
Phillipe Wigger, electrical contractor in Oerlikon and co-founder

Digitising does not mean replacing paper with a screen. It has to make steps simpler — or remove them altogether. Which is why the goal is not software with as many buttons as possible, but as little administration as possible for the electrician.

The decision

Why electrical work and not "every tradesman"

Software for every trade knows customers, jobs, hours and invoices. That is the same for a painter as it is for you, which is why it can be built for everyone at once. It is just not what your business turns on: the rules that count for you are specific to electrical work, and not one of them falls out of a general job module.

  • The inspection intervals under the NIV — five, ten or twenty years depending on the installation, counted from the last inspection and not from the job.
  • Independence under NIV Art. 33 — whoever installed it does not inspect it themselves. That is an assignment rule software has to know before it schedules an appointment.
  • The safety verification certificate to the grid operator — with the test report attached, with a deadline, and with the question of who signs.
  • The catalogues — ELDAS for the article master data, Steiger for the estimating items, NPK for tendering. Without reading them in, you are retyping item numbers.

Software that serves every trade knows none of them. Nor can it: for a painter, every one of these would be dead weight.

The core

Why the installation and not the job

Most programs put the job at the centre. It is opened, worked through, billed and closed, and after that it drops away behind you. For your work that is the wrong bracket, because what remains is not the job but the installation.

  1. 01A job is finished in two weeks. An electrical installation lives for forty years and is touched again and again.
  2. 02On the second call-out to the same address, what counts is what was measured, replaced and labelled the first time — not what the job was called back then.
  3. 03The inspection interval belongs to the installation. A job-centred system simply cannot hold it; it can only note it down alongside.

With us the installation is the dossier. Jobs, job reports, measurements and documents hang off it instead of replacing it.

Limits

What we deliberately do not build

Deciding for one trade means deciding against a fair amount else. We write it down before you have to ask.

  • No grid operator notification system. That belongs to M2 and ElektroForm from Brunner Informatik, and your grid operator is connected to it.
  • No accounting. bexio, Abacus and Banana stay where they are, and so does your fiduciary.
  • No payroll. We record the time; the pay run happens in a program that does nothing else.

All five limits, each with its reason

Data

Where your data sits

Data held in Switzerland and the EU

A hard requirement with cantonal and municipal clients.

revDSG

The right of access is built in, not bolted on afterwards.

Retention under OR Art. 958f

Ten years for the books, until the next inspection for the certificates.

We do not write that your data never leaves the country. That would sound punchier and, put that way, would not be true. Switzerland and the EU are two places, and you should know which two.

Location

Where we are

Kundenbox GmbH, Zurich, Switzerland. Development happens here, and the answer comes from here when you write to us.

The application speaks German and French, and so does this site. Italian is planned; we will name a date only once there is one.

Put us to the test before you decide.

45 minutes, at your place or on screen. You show us a week from your business, and we tell you what works with us — and what does not.

Arrange a conversation