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Meet Beacon Electric
This manual uses a single company throughout: Beacon Electric. BigWave is built for any service business that schedules people, tracks equipment and sends invoices. Beacon, our example company, is an electrical services contractor.
Beacon Electric
Twelve people. Marcus Chen owns the place. He came up as an electrician, spends most of his week now in reports and project setup, and still takes a call himself when a longtime customer asks for him by name. Priya Nair runs the office. She books the jobs, assigns the crew, keeps the books, and spends a surprising amount of her week chasing paperwork that should have come back signed. Grace Bennett is the accountant. The other nine are electricians in trucks. One of them, Tom Delgado, has been there long enough that he turns up in most of the field examples in this manual.
Beacon does commercial and residential work. Plenty of service companies split the same way, which makes it a useful example.
Customer - Harbor Grill Restaurants
Twelve locations, one regional chain, one facilities department. In BigWave that’s a single Customer record with twelve Sites, not twelve separate customers who happen to share a name.
Beacon holds their annual inspection contract. Panels and emergency lighting checked once a year at every location, plus whatever breaks in between. Harbor Grill won’t pay an invoice without a purchase order number on it, and they want a signed inspection report before they’ll sign off on the visit. Reasonable, from their side. It means Beacon’s paperwork has to be right every time.
Harbor Grill is where the commercial examples come from: multi-site projects, contract rates, registered equipment, recurring maintenance that generates its own work orders, and a portal login for their facilities manager so she stops emailing Priya for status updates.
Customer - The Okafors
A house, an aging electrical panel, and a call to Beacon asking what a replacement would cost. One customer, one site, one quote, one job, one invoice.
Later on, the Okafors buy a lake house. That property becomes a second Site under the same Customer record, not a new customer. A customer can have several places you send technicians to do work.
The Okafors carry the residential thread through the manual. Fast intake, a quote approved by email, and an invoice emailed directly to the homeowner.
How the work is organized
Beacon runs three projects:
- Residential Service. Every homeowner job, regardless of which homeowner.
- Commercial Service. Commercial calls that come in one at a time, with no standing contract behind them.
- Harbor Grill Annual Inspections. The inspection contract, on its own because it runs by different rules: its own statuses, its own paperwork, its own rates.
A project in BigWave is a line of work in your service business. Three lines of work, three projects. Chapter 9 walks through building one.