How a one-man electrician runs every quote and invoice from HubSpot in minutes

I retired last year after 28 years in sales and decided to set myself up as an electrician. I'm based in the Bradford area, working on my own as Smart Smith Electrical.

After a career carrying a CRM around in my pocket, I knew that going back to scraps of paper and an address book was a recipe for dropped balls. When you get busy, things slip. Customers you said you'd ring back. Quotes you said you'd send. I didn't want to start a new business and have that be how it felt.

So I picked HubSpot. The free tier covered what I needed, and the marketplace looked deep. That's where I came across Portant.

20 minutes for a quote, four address fields at a time

The native quote and invoice templates inside HubSpot work, but they were too bland for what I wanted to send. I'd be a small business looking like every other small business. So I tried doing it the long way, copying every detail into my own template by hand.

Even an address takes four or five fields to copy out of a HubSpot contact. By the time I'd done the customer name, the address, the description of the job and the line items, it was a 20-minute job per quote. Multiply that by a few quotes a day and you're working through every evening.

And my wife quite likes me to talk to her in the evenings.

I wanted documents that didn't look like a one-man band

The other thing I wanted was branding. As a small business, I think it really helps to look memorable. So I built a Google Doc template with a coloured bar down one side, my logo where I wanted it, my bank details printed on every invoice, and a QR code at the bottom that takes the customer straight to my Google reviews page. They scan, they leave a review, done.

It looks clean. It looks intentional. It does not look like the same generic template every other tradesperson is sending out.

I started the templates in Word, but they never quite behaved. After a chat with someone at Portant, I moved everything into Google. My web provider doesn't include a calendar on its basic plan, so I picked up Google Workspace anyway, and now my templates, calendar and email all live in the same account.

Bark to HubSpot to Portant, how the workflow runs

Most of my leads come in through Bark. They feed straight into HubSpot, so the customer's name, address and inquiry are already on the deal when I open it.

From there, my flow is simple.

I add the materials I need as line items in HubSpot. I add my labour as another line, with the hours. I open Portant, pick the quote workflow, and press go. Fifteen, twenty, sometimes thirty seconds later the PDF is ready to send.

Quotes and invoices use almost identical data, so I have a template for each. The quote has a short terms and conditions block at the bottom. The invoice swaps that for a "payment due on completion" line and the QR code. Same data underneath, different document on top.

I send most of them through HubSpot now rather than my own mail client. I get notifications when the customer opens the email, which has been quietly fascinating. One customer opened my quote eight times before they came back to me. I don't know why. But it tells me they were thinking about it.

Five minutes from front door to invoice sent

The biggest shift is in headspace.

Before, putting a quote together meant sitting down at a desk in the evening, getting in the right frame of mind, copying half a dozen fields into a template, sense-checking the totals, and only then sending it out. After a full day of electrical work, that's a lot to ask of yourself.

Now, I get home, open Portant, pick the workflow, and the invoice is gone. Five minutes from the front door, the day is invoiced. The materials list is the only bit I actually have to think about. Everything else, the customer details, the formatting, the bank details, the QR code, is already there in the template.

I'm on the free 30-document plan. I used quite a few when I was setting things up, and this month I'm at nine documents with another ten or so to come before it resets. As the business grows, I'll move to a paid plan. For where I am, that's a sensible problem to have.

What I want to add next

I'd love sequential document numbering. Today's report is 001. Tomorrow's is 002. Set it once, forget it. I've been told there's already a way to do this with Portant's formula features, so I have some homework.

I'm also working on inspection reports for the electrical testing side of the business. The plan is to pull the company details out of HubSpot in the same way, then list each item I've tested with its serial number and result. That part is still manual today, and it's the next thing I want to take off my plate.

For where I am as a one-man band, three months in, Portant has done what I needed it to do. It hides the fact that there's only one of me, gets professional documents out the door fast, and gives me my evenings back.

If you're early in a business and want quotes, invoices and reports that look like they came from a bigger team, you can install Portant from the HubSpot Marketplace and get going for free.