Apps are no longer just for games or killing time on your phone. These days, apps can be incredibly useful tools that can help make your professional life easier. If you’re a gas and heating engineer, the right app can help you monitor safety standards, solve problems on the job, keep track of your workflow, and easily create invoices for your clients.
Let’s take a look at the top 7 apps for gas and heating engineers and how they can help lighten your workload and ensure you are providing the best service possible for your clients.
**See below for 2024 update.
1. Gas App UK
This app is a good all-in-one standard that provides access to thousands of manuals for domestic and commercial appliances; a useful resource for both established gas engineers and those taking training courses. This app also allows you to easily create digital forms which you can customise as needed. You can even add your own logo.
There is also a business management component that can help with things like expense tracking and job scheduling. There is even software which will allow you to custom-craft quotes for your clients. This app also includes tools that will help you with things like pipe sizing, gas ratings, and troubleshooting problems while on the job.
Gas App UK is also a great way to connect with the trade community through video reviews from fellow professional engineers that evaluate things like new tools, practices, and products. This can help you improve the quality of your work and business. This app also provides a forum where colleagues can connect and discuss details of the trade.
The best part is that is app is now free to all registered Gas Safe Engineers. The subscription used to cost £25, but as of January 2020, this fee is now being waived for all who fit into this category.
2. Boiler Fault Finder
This app is specifically geared toward helping gas and heating engineers identify problems with a customer’s boiler quickly and easily. This helps eliminate the need for long conversations with boiler technical departments to try to identify issues while on the job. Instead, you can easily sort through the database on this app to accurately and efficiently identify a wide variety of boiler issues.
This app also comes with access to additional manuals and a CP12 certificate template. There is a fee for this app, but at £9.99 for a yearly subscription, it’s worth the price.
3. Gas Certificate App
This app is the central tool for all things form and certificate related. The Gas Certificate App has easily customisation forms and lets you generate domestic and non-domestic gas certificates and domestic oil certificates. It also makes it easy for you to create job sheets and develop and utilise secure electronic signatures. You can also set reminders to help you send the right paperwork to your clients at the right time.
Another attractive feature of this app is the bank-level security encryption that allows you to store sensitive information safely. This is a great way to keep track of a client’s contact details, certificates, job addresses, and financial details without fear of a security leak.
This app is one of the more expensive options at £65 a year, but it does come with a free 30-day trial so you can test it out and see for yourself if it’s worth the expense.
4. Anton Sprint Mobile App
This app is specifically developed to help make the administrative side of your business easier. You can add your company name, logo, and contact details in the initial set up so they will be automatically added to any reports generated through this app. This app makes it much easier to create and send FGA reports to your clients and can generate personalised reports on-site for fast and easy communication with your customers. This app can also generate gas certificates, landlord certificates, and service sheets. It’s also set up to create a variety of notices that you will probably find yourself needing at one point or another in your business such as safety notices and warning notices. You can also use this app to set reminders for each of your customer’s annual boiler servicing needs.
This app was created to work with an Anton Sprint eVo3 Bluetooth enabled analyser. If you don’t have one of these devices, you can still use this app for the previously mentioned features and to calculate things like gas rate, pipe size and ventilation. It can even monitor radiator output and energy conversion. Pairing this app with the analyser will give you access to even more useful features such as the ability to email gas, pressure, temperature, and CO room safety reports directly to your clients.
This app is available for Android and iOS devices and is free to download and use.
5. SmartTrade App
The SmartTrade App is another free option to help you organise the administrative and logistical side of your business. This app is especially useful if you need to take credit card payments either in person or over the phone. If you ever take payments on-site, you’ll want to be sure you have a secure and effective way to do so. This app fills this need in a contact-free way that is easy to use. You can also generate and send out electronic versions of receipts or invoices for your clients.
This app also comes with templates that will make it easier to generate quotes for your clients and organisational tools to track the quotes you’ve already sent. You can also organise other client-related information like payments, location details, maps, calendars, and job notes. It will also make it easier to handle the financial side of your business by providing cash flow and expense reports.
6. Gas Engineer Software
This app also helps with the administrative and organisational side of running a gas and heating business. The Gas Engineer Software app claims to help you save 10 hours of work a week by centralising all of your administrative tasks and enabling you to handle much of this work on-site. This cuts down on the number of hours you need to spend handling invoices, certificates, reports, and financial transactions in the evenings.
Through this app you can send before and after pictures of a job to your clients. You can also easily generate and send quotes, certificates, and invoices including domestic and non-domestic gas certificates, domestic oil certificates, job sheets, Legionella, and minor electrical works. All of your work is organised in an office portal that makes it easy to manage your workload and view un-invoiced jobs and jobs with unpaid invoices. You can also set up completely customisation automatic service reminders for your customers.
This app also offers bank-level encryption for extra security and frequent backups, so you never have to worry about losing your work or information. You can restore any lost information down to the second for two weeks, or to the day going back 4 years. This is possibly the highest level of backup security you could hope to get from an affordable gas and heating app.
Speaking of affordable, this app does cost £75+ VAT a year. However, this fee is per user, not per device, so you can download the app onto as many devices as you want. This means you always have access to your information whether you’re on your phone or tablet in the field, or on your desktop or laptop at home.
7. Gas Tag
This app can only be used when working on a property with a Gas Tag subscription, but it is incredibly useful if you are servicing such a location. Over 1.5 million properties in the UK use this service, and the app is free to download for all Gas Safe Registered engineers. The verification feature on the app ensures that only certified engineers can benefit from the Gas Tag subscription of a property.
If you can use this app in conjunction with a property, you can instantly access the work history of the site and see what problems have occurred and what fixes have been performed on the property in the past. This is supported with data that is timestamped, geo-tagged, and verified through photo evidence.
2024 App Update
The landscape of apps for gas and heating engineers has expanded significantly since 2020, with new tools offering even greater convenience, efficiency, and safety features. Below, we introduce the latest additions transforming the industry in 2024.
1. Gas Checker 2.0
Gas Checker 2.0 is the newly updated version of the popular Gas Checker app, designed to streamline the creation of gas reports, invoices, and service records. This app is ideal for commercial and domestic gas engineers, offering customisable digital forms that can be synced across devices via cloud integration. With its ability to function offline and automatic data backup, Gas Checker 2.0 ensures that your records are secure and accessible, even in remote locations.
2. BigChange
BigChange is a comprehensive platform redefining how gas and heating engineers manage their operations. It offers a powerful combination of job scheduling, CRM integration, vehicle tracking, and real-time communication, all within an intuitive, user-friendly interface. BigChange also allows engineers to generate digital gas safety certificates, track job progress, and manage customer communications seamlessly from any device. Its cloud-based system ensures that your data is always secure and accessible, making it an indispensable tool for growing businesses..
3. Tradify
Tradify has emerged as a strong contender for those looking to simplify their business operations. This app offers digital timesheets, automated service reminders, and seamless integration with popular accounting systems like Xero and QuickBooks. Tradify’s subcontractor management feature allows for easy scheduling and communication with external partners, while its instant website creation tool can help attract new clients and streamline job inquiries.
4. Gas Engineer Software
Gas Engineer Software continues to be a leading choice, now with even more features to enhance productivity. It enables engineers to create and send digital certificates and invoices directly from their mobile devices, automate service reminders, and integrate with tools like Flue Gas Analyzers (FGA) and accounting software. With a strong focus on customer relationship management (CRM), this app ensures that all aspects of your business, from job management to customer communication, are handled efficiently.
To Sum it Up
If you are a gas or heating engineer, you probably already know that technology, tools, and practices are constantly changing and evolving. Resources are also changing to help you do the best work possible and stay at the top of your field. The apps listed here are great examples of resources that will help you stay relevant in your work and keep pace with your business as it grows so neither the practical work nor the administrative and logistical tasks fall to the wayside. This will enable you to provide the best service possible for your customers so your business can continue to grow and expand.
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