Why My CoC Now Lives on My Phone, Not in My Bakkie

For years my Certificate of Compliance book lived in the bakkie. It sat with the rest of the kit, and like the rest of the kit it only mattered at the end of a job. That was the problem. The end of a job is the worst time for paperwork. The client wants to talk about the invoice, the next call is already coming in, and I was filling in the book by hand: certificate numbers and installation details. The client copy had to be handed over and my copy had to be filed. Filing meant later, and later is a rare thing when a small team is on the tools, on the phone and on the road, all in the same day.

A while back I moved my CoCs onto WACC. It's a digital platform built for exactly this. You issue plumbing certificates of compliance from a phone, a tablet or a laptop. Registration is free, and apart from uploading my trade qualification so they could check it's really me, there was nothing to it. The thing that sold me wasn't a feature at all. My phone is already on every job, in my pocket. The certificate could live where my phone already lives.

Now the end of a job goes like this. The tools are going away and, before I've left the driveway, I open the app. The questions are based on the SANS standards, so I work through the same checks the standard asks for before I sign. I photograph the work while I'm still standing at it, the new valve, the drip tray, the pipe runs, and I issue the certificate on the spot. Just being able to capture CoCs digitally, the ease of it, has changed how the end of a job feels. No hunting for the book. No pen that has given up. The record is time-stamped, stored in the cloud and searchable, so when a client phones two years later about a geyser I signed off, that certificate is a search away, not a box away.

What I never expected was how much the customer values it. The certificate my client receives carries the job photos and the date, and that matters more in three years' time than it does on the day. Geysers get replaced, houses get sold, and eventually a conveyancer or an insurer asks for proof that the hot water installation was done properly. When that call comes, the paperwork answers for both of us: what was installed, when, and what it looked like on the day. A paper copy in a filing box does the same job, if you can find it, and if the ink survived the bakkie.

We're a small team, so every system we use either adds work to the day or takes it away. WACC takes it away. The fact that it has a mobile app just makes things so much easier. We pay per certificate and there's no monthly fee, which is the right shape of cost for an outfit like ours. Nothing in the quiet weeks, and only something to pay when there's work behind it. If you're still running certificates out of a paper book, this is the upgrade. It took me one job to stop missing the old way.

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