Solar Installer CRM

The problem

The client wanted to digitise and speed up a paperwork-heavy workflow that ran on spreadsheets, email and shared drives.

Pricing a job meant working through an Excel costing workbook and hand-tuning markups until the totals reconciled. Government submissions meant typing owner details onto blank PDFs, printing them, chasing a wet signature, scanning and emailing them on. The project manager tracked everything still outstanding on a sticky-note board.

There was no single view of a job from enquiry to handover, and no numbers on how the business was actually performing.

What I did

Designed and built the whole system. The core was porting their costing workbook into a documented pricing engine (original cell references preserved in the comments), which eliminated the manual markup-reconciliation step that only existed because a spreadsheet couldn’t solve for it directly.

Around it I built the calculations a rep used to do by hand: system size and deal value derived live from a monthly power bill, a 25-year savings projection with payback interpolated inside the crossing year, electrical guard-rails checking supply capacity and DC:AC ratio, and a daily feed of the regulated tariff.

The paperwork side replaces print-sign-scan entirely. An intake questionnaire the owner completes through a tokenised link auto-fills 35 mapped fields across every authority form in one pass, and contracts run a full e-signature round trip with an audit certificate page, automatic counter-signing and an archived executed PDF.

Winning a deal then fires a seven-step handoff that creates the project, carries the proposal’s bill of materials into equipment with stock shortfalls flagged, raises a work order per supplier, seeds the maintenance plan and lays out delivery milestones.

Underneath, row-level security on every table and column-level masking so sales roles physically cannot read cost or profit figures, enforced by a database trigger rather than UI checks.

Outcome

Proposal turnaround dropped from 45–60 minutes to under 15, and because a design change now reprices the whole quote automatically instead of leaving totals stale, a revision goes back to the customer the same day rather than the next.

The generated handover pack and auto-filled submissions removed the assembly work at both ends of a job, including barcode capture for the 30–60 panel serials that used to be typed off a pallet sheet. A derived chase board replaced the sticky-note board, grouped by whoever owes the next thing so one phone call clears items across several jobs.

Every module also surfaces numbers the business simply didn’t have before: win rate, average sales cycle, median days to sign, capacity won by build stage.

Shipped iteratively over about three months and 133 migrations. It was built for a single installer, but every table carries an organisation key from the first migration, so it can grow into a multi-tenant product later rather than needing a rebuild.