Solar Mate CRM

What a solar business needs the system to hold

• The job as the record, with the customer attached to it, not the other way around.
• Site assessment findings, including the photos that decide whether the design survives.
• Design and quote revisions, with a record of which version the customer accepted.
• Every document the job requires, and a view of what's still missing.
• A status for each third party you're waiting on, and how long you've waited.
• Install scheduling that weighs crew, equipment and the customer together.
• Post install steps through to the claim, and reporting that ends in installed capacity and cash collected.

Why a generic CRM never fits a solar business

Every CRM on the market rests on one assumption: a deal moves forward when your salesperson does something. Call made, quote sent, closed won. In solar that assumption is wrong, and wrong in a way that costs jobs rather than just annoying the office.

A solar job runs through lead, site assessment, design, quote, finance approval, connection application, install booking, install, inspection and rebate claim. Roughly half of those sit elsewhere: the distributor working the connection application on its own timeframe, the finance provider assessing your customer, the inspector who attends when they attend, and the scheme processing the claim. Nobody in your sales team can move those. They can only chase.

That breaks a generic pipeline in a specific way. In a normal CRM, a deal with no activity for three weeks is a cold lead to chase or close lost. In solar the same silent job might be perfectly healthy and sitting with a distributor, or it might be one where the application was never actually lodged, and from the outside those look identical. The field that matters isn't stage. It's who you're waiting on and since when. Sort by that and the morning follow up list writes itself, including the jobs where you're the one holding things up.

The second break is documents. A job accumulates site photos, switchboard shots, the roof layout, the design, signed acceptance, finance paperwork and whatever the claim requires. A generic CRM staples files to a contact record as a flat list, so nobody can tell what's missing until the crew is on site or the claim is knocked back. Documents belong to the job, with a checklist per stage.

Then there's quoting. A solar quote isn't a product picked from a list, it's a design: panel count, inverter, racking, plus site specifics like a switchboard upgrade or a long cable run that turn a standard system into a different price. When a generic CRM produces that quote, your team rebuilds it in a spreadsheet anyway and the accepted version lives in someone's sent items. Since the site assessment often changes the design, revision history is how you prove what was agreed.

Scheduling fails from the other end. A booked install needs a crew, the customer at home and the stock allocated, so a calendar that only knows crews will have you cancelling on customers.

The last one shows up in the bank account. Generic CRMs treat a job as finished at install, so nobody watches the tail. Inspection, paperwork and the claim are where your money sits, and work that isn't a stage with an owner is tracked by whoever remembers. Reporting should end there too, at installed capacity and cash collected by lead source, with average days waiting broken down by third party. That number tells you which finance partner or distributor is quietly costing you a fortnight per job.

How it goes in

1. We map your process, including documents and third party dependencies, which are never quite the next installer's.

2. We agree scope and price.

Fixed number, dates in writing.

3. We configure and migrate, jobs in flight included.

4. We train office and field separately, because they use it differently.

Who it's for, and who it isn't

It suits installers running enough volume that jobs get lost between the office and the crew, and businesses whose admin load has outgrown their install numbers.

It isn't for a two person operation doing a handful of installs a month. It also isn't automatic if you already pay for a CRM platform, because the answer is often configuration. That's what our CRM consultants look at first.

Evidence, not claims about understanding your industry

We built the website for Dayton Solar, a business selling wholesale product to installers and complete systems to homeowners from the same brand. Client reported results were traffic up 70% within three months of launch and organic leads up 50%.

That job meant learning how installers buy and how homeowners decide.

Why bring this here

In house developers, who also run the hosting under it. More of our work sits on the apps and custom software page.

No lock in contracts, and the code is yours.

One account manager who knows your business without you re explaining it.

"We've already got a CRM nobody uses."

Usually because it was built for a sales team and your business isn't one. We'll look at what you have before recommending a build.