Ecommerce pioneers launch startup to transform the plumbing and building industry
Powered Now (www.powerednow.com), a new startup from the creator of the UK’s first publicly quoted ecommerce company, aims to transform the paperwork overhead experienced by plumbers, electricians, builders, gardeners and other field service professionals who waste at least 500 million hours a year on administration.
This is a new platform aimed specifically at the hundreds of thousands of small business managers and employees that don’t work in an office but still have to deal with large amounts of paperwork. This is a hugely underserved community and the IT revolution of the last 20 years has largely passed this sector by.The Powered Now App, available in beta for iOS and Android, cuts down the huge time drain caused by administrating field service jobs and long hours that have to be spent back at home recording what has happened.
Powered Now handles all aspects of business administration for field trade firms, including invoicing, quotes, CRM and product management. In the future, it will also offer industry specific features such as certificate production for gas engineers.
The founders of Powered Now are Chris Barling and Ben Dyer, long serving entrepreneurs and responsible for Actinic – one of the UK’s longest operating and most trusted ecommerce systems.
‘Having spotted the ecommerce revolution that was to come in the early 90s, we are now betting on the tablet market as the future of multiple sectors,’ said Ben Dyer, Powered Now cofounder.
‘We believe that in the next five years, the majority of field services companies will be operating on tablet based infrastructures – and we want Powered Now to be the platform of choice,’ he continued.
Actinic’s cloud based division was purchased by French company Oxatis in 2011 and Barling and Dyer have utilised some of the proceeds to self launch Powered Now, and will now begin the process for a venture round.
Powered Now will offer a complete end-to-end solution for field service businesses without the need for specialist equipment. It runs completely on iOS and Android, and does not need a constant Internet connection to function, although everything is backed up when a connection is available.
The current process for managing admin is either time intensive (usually on an old laptop, done in the evenings), or non-existent (a hand written quote or invoice). Powered Now will enable professionally generated quotes, invoices and certificates to be created within minutes of leaving a job – and all from a single App on a single device. The platform is suited to individuals or teams, and projects can be assigned and managed within a company with ease.
