Zerta

Zerta did not start in an office; it started in the evenings, after a full day on site and when small children were settled in their beds.

It was triggered by the frustrations of a small, family-run, solo-electrician electrical firm. Like a lot of small UK businesses, our workload changes constantly. Some months are flat out, others are quieter - jobs vary in size, and the pace has to flex around real life, especially childcare, school runs, and the reality of one person on the tools full-time, with limited support from a spouse working full‑time.

No matter how the month looks, one thing never changes: every job still needs to be certified properly, and every certificate still needs to look professional.

For a long time, that meant doing the actual electrical work during the day - sometimes using printed forms, but more often sitting down in the evenings to deal with the digital paperwork. Booting up a laptop just to open Adobe InDesign; tweaking layouts; exporting PDFs. All after a full day on site. We looked at what else was available, the features and costs of them, and ran into frustration.

Some systems rely on annoying pre-paid bought tokens. Other tools are wrapped up in large trade platforms that want to manage your entire business, from invoicing to scheduling to customer tracking and job bookings on its calendar, which might make sense at a larger firm, but doesn't suit when all you actually need is a reliable way to produce certificates. Most of them came with monthly or annual subscriptions that cut into profits, even in months where you might not issue a single certificate because it's the summer holidays and kids are off school so the pace of work has to drop down.

None of it felt built for one main electrician working on their own, occasionally pairing up with another firm on larger jobs, juggling site work, family life, and admin in the gaps. What we really wanted was something simple.

We wanted a way to open our phone on site, start recording bits of the job details as we go, not having to know everything upfront. Something that worked even in the middle of an rural building without internet access, and with poor or no data signal. Something that let us generate a clean, compliant PDF before leaving the job and pop into an email outbox if we wanted to. Something that did not lock us into subscriptions, tokens, or enterprise-level pricing that made no sense for how we actually work. We couldn't find it.

So we built it.

Zerta is the app we went looking for and wished already existed. A no-fuss, offline-first mobile app that helps you create, store, and share BS 7671 certificates properly, without the admin hassle of bigger solutions designed and suited for larger firms. It remembers your details, reduces repetitive typing, and produces professional PDFs that you would be happy to hand to a client, but is built for solo electricians and small UK firms.

If you are trying to balance real life with doing the job professionally as a solo electrician or very small UK firm, we hope Zerta makes that part of your work a little easier.