Quality Control for Trade Firms: A System, Not a Binder

Quality control for trade firms comes down to four moving parts, and none of them is a binder on a shelf. First, you write down what done means for each job type you actually sell — a short, checkable list, not a policy. Second, every completed job produces exactly one inspection record, signed off by the person who did the work, attached to the job. Third, once a week you spend fifteen minutes looking at what came back — callbacks, complaints, rework, snags — and you ask why. Fourth, and this is the part most firms never reach, you change the definition of done so the fault cannot happen again. Checking work catches a fault once. A system stops it recurring. That is the whole difference.

Why "we're careful" stopped being an answer

For years, a small firm could win work on reputation and a handshake. That still helps. But the paperwork gate has moved.

Main contractors, housing associations, letting agents, insurers and public buyers now ask for documented QA before they sign, not after something goes wrong. In Sweden the word is beställare — the ordering client — and they will ask for your egenkontroll (self-inspection) routine as part of the tender. In the UK the same demand arrives as a PAS 91 or SSIP prequalification question, a CDM duty, or a client asking for your ITP (inspection and test plan). In New Zealand and Australia it turns up as a Producer Statement or a QA plan attached to the build contract.

Different names, one question: show me the record. Not your intentions. The record.

The second reason costs you more than the first. Every callback is a van, two hours, a fuel bill, an apology, and a job you cannot invoice. Ten a year is a working fortnight you gave away. Quality control is not admin overhead. It is the cheapest way to stop buying your own mistakes back.

Step 1: Define "done" for each job type

Most quality systems fail because they are written for the whole company. Nobody can check a company. People check jobs.

So start from your actual job types. A small electrical firm might have six: consumer unit change, EV charger install, socket or lighting alteration, fault-find, periodic inspection, new-build first fix. A plumbing firm: boiler swap, bathroom refit, leak repair, service visit, unvented cylinder. You almost certainly have fewer than ten job types covering 90% of your turnover. Write them on a page.

Then, for each one, answer a single question: what has to be true before I would be happy for a stranger to inspect this? Keep it to five to twelve checkable items. Each item must be binary. "Neat work" is not an item. "All cable entries glanded and tight" is.

What a good definition of done looks like

"Installation carried out to a high standard. Site left tidy. Customer happy." None of that is checkable. This is:

• Circuit schedule filled in and fixed inside the board — photo
• Ze / Zs readings recorded for every circuit — values entered
• RCD trip times recorded and within limits — values entered
• Torque check on every terminal, torque driver used — tick plus initials
• Isolation point labelled and photographed
• Old parts removed from site or handed over — tick, name of who took them
• Customer shown how to reset the RCD — tick
• Final photo of the finished board, door closed, from a metre back

Notice what that list does. It is a QA checklist, a handover script, a training document for an apprentice, and your defence if the job is disputed in eighteen months. One artefact, four uses — worth an hour of your evening per job type.

Rules that keep these lists alive:

• Twelve items maximum. A list nobody finishes is worse than no list, because it teaches your team that ticking is theatre.
• Every item is provable. A photo, a reading, a serial number, a signature. If an item cannot be proven, it is an opinion — cut it.
• Photos are named, not dumped. "Board before", "board after", "isolation point" beats forty untitled images nobody will open.
• Write it in your own words. A downloaded trade-body template is a starting point, not a system.

Step 2: One attested inspection record per completed job

One job, one record, signed by the person who did the work. Not a shared folder. Not a WhatsApp thread. Not a paper pad in the van that reaches the office in March.

Sweden calls this the egenkontroll or protokoll: the installer's own attested check that the work meets the standard. The UK equivalent is your certificate plus the ITP sign-off; in NZ, the QA record behind the Producer Statement. The label does not matter. Three properties do.

• Attested. A named person signs it and a timestamp is recorded. "The company checked it" is not attestation. "Jonas Berg, 14:20, 8 July" is.
• Attached to the job. Not filed by date or by customer name. Attached to the job record, so it travels with the invoice, the photos, the quote and the variation.
• Produced on site, before the van leaves. A record written the next morning is a memory, and memories are the thing you are trying to replace.

The gate that makes this real: a job cannot be marked complete until its record exists. Not a rule on a poster — a rule in whatever you use to run jobs. If completion is free and the record is optional, you will get records on the easy jobs and none on the hard ones, which is precisely backwards.

This is one of the few places software earns its keep. In OdinTask the protokoll builder turns each definition of done into a template tied to the job type, captures photos and readings on the phone (it works with no signal and syncs later), requires an attest signature, and produces a PDF the client gets with the invoice. The point is not the app. The point is that the record and the job are the same object, so neither goes missing without the other.

Step 3: The weekly 15-minute review of what came back

Records alone are a filing cabinet. The review turns them into a system.

Pick a fixed slot. Friday, 15 minutes, in the diary as a real appointment. Look at one thing only: what came back this week. Callbacks, complaints, snags, rework, a customer who rang twice, a part that failed, a job that overran by half a day. For each one, write four fields and nothing more:

That last column is the entire exercise. If a review ends without a change to a checklist, a template, a supplier or a training point, it was a moan. One change a week is fifty a year, and your checklists end up encoding every expensive lesson the firm has paid for.

Two habits keep it honest:

• No names in the root cause. Write the mechanism, not the person. The moment a review becomes a hearing, your team stops reporting callbacks and you go blind.
• Count them. One number every week: callbacks per completed job. Ignore benchmarks; watch your own trend line. If it falls over a quarter, the system works.

Checking work vs building a system: the actual difference

Checking is a person. A system is a shape the work runs through whether or not that person is having a good week. The test: if you went away for two weeks, would the quality of the work be different when you got back? If yes, you have checking, not a system.

The five ways small-firm QA dies

• The binder. A 40-page quality manual written to pass an audit, never opened again. If it is not in the hand of the person doing the work, at the moment they do it, it does not exist.
• Tick theatre. Eighteen items, all ticked in nine seconds in the van. Cure: cut the list, and require proof on the items that bite.
• The owner as bottleneck. Everything routes through one person's judgement. Cure: write that judgement down once, as a definition of done.
• Records with no loop. Good documentation, nobody reads it, the same fault recurs for three years. Cure: the 15-minute review, in the diary.
• Two systems. Checklists in one place, jobs in another, photos on a phone. Cure: one job record that carries everything.

How to start on Monday, not in Q4

1. This week: list your job types. Pick the one with the most callbacks — you already know which it is.
2. Tonight, one hour: write the definition of done for that job type. Eight items, every one provable.
3. Next 20 jobs: require the record before the job is marked complete. No exceptions, including yours.
4. Every Friday, 15 minutes: review what came back. Change one thing.
5. After a month: do the second job type. Then the third. You are done in a quarter, and you never wrote a binder.

Quality control for trade firms is not a document you produce for a client. It is what you would want in place if you had to defend your own work in two years, in front of someone who was not there. Write down what done means. Prove it once per job. Look at what came back. Change the list.

If you want the record and the job to be the same thing — checklist templates per job type, attest signatures on site, photos that stay with the job, a PDF the client actually gets — that is what OdinTask does. There is a 14-day free trial, and the pricing page has the plans.