Most "best CRM" lists are written for sales teams. An electrical shop with one to five people has a different problem: the CRM has to survive being used with one thumb, in a crawlspace, by someone who is not going to do data entry at 9pm.
The eight things that actually matter
- Intake that captures the contact automatically. If a web request does not create the customer record, you have a form, not a CRM.
- A visible pipeline. Stage buttons on the card beat a dropdown nobody opens.
- Push notifications with call and text buttons. Speed to lead is the whole game in service work.
- A price book. Estimating from memory is where small shops lose margin.
- Estimates the customer can approve and pay a deposit on, online.
- Invoicing and card payments from the field, into your own merchant account.
- Recurring/maintenance work that regenerates itself.
- Reviews requested at sign-off, while the customer is still happy.
The traps
Per-user pricing punishes you the moment you hire your first helper. Payment processing that routes money through the vendor delays your cash and adds a layer between you and a dispute. Feature gating splits the basics — recurring work, estimate approvals, QC — across three tiers so the plan you need is never the plan you priced. And migration cost is real: check whether you can export customers, jobs and invoices before you import anything.
How to evaluate one in a week
- Day 1: put your five most common jobs into the price book with real numbers.
- Day 2: send yourself a request through the public form and see whether a customer record appears.
- Day 3: run one real estimate through approval and deposit.
- Day 4: schedule and complete one job on your phone only — no laptop.
- Day 5: invoice from the driveway and confirm the payout hits your own account.
If any step needs a laptop or a support ticket, that is your answer.
Where LetMeWork sits
LetMeWork was built inside a working electrical company for exactly this size of shop. Intake creates the customer, the pipeline is visible on every card, and recurring plans, estimate approvals and QC reviews are included on every tier instead of being upsells. Payments connect to your own Stripe account, so the money is never routed through us.