Field service software for solar and heat pump installers: a buyer's guide

The short answer

Most installers do not have a software problem. They have a chain of custody problem: the same information is written down four times — once on the survey, once on the quote, once in the van, once in the handover pack — and every re-entry is a chance to lose it. The software that helps is the software that makes the survey become the job, and the job become the paperwork, without anybody re-typing a serial number.

If you take one thing from this guide, take the test in the next section. It separates products built for renewables from products that will need you to change how you work.

Four questions that separate the real options

1. Does it work with no signal at all?

Not "does it cache a bit" — does an engineer with aeroplane mode on, in a loft, halfway through a commissioning sheet, keep working and lose nothing? The places renewables work happens are the places signal fails: lofts, cellars, plant rooms, new-builds with foil-backed insulation, rural properties at the end of a track.

This is the single most common reason field service rollouts fail in this sector. Software that needs a connection to save gets quietly abandoned inside a fortnight, and the team reverts to paper and photographs sent over WhatsApp. Ask for a demonstration with the device in aeroplane mode. If the answer is a slide rather than a demonstration, you have your answer.

2. Is scheme evidence captured at the point of work?

A renewables job generates a body of evidence that has to be assembled correctly for certification: commissioning readings, photographs at defined stages, equipment serial numbers, sign-offs. There are two ways to produce it. One is to capture it as the work happens, structured, on the device. The other is to reconstruct it a fortnight later from memory, a camera roll and a phone call to the engineer who fitted it.

The second way is where installers lose most of their office hours, and it is where certification delays come from. The right question is not "does it store documents" but "does it refuse to let the job be marked complete until the required evidence exists".

3. Are the survey, the job and the handover the same record?

In a lot of installers, the survey lives in one place, the quote in another, the scheduled job in a third and the handover pack in a shared drive. Each boundary is a re-keying opportunity. The measure of a good system is how many times a customer's name, address and equipment list get typed. The right answer is once.

4. What happens when the job goes wrong?

Demonstrations show the happy path: survey, schedule, install, done. Ask instead about the day the scaffold is late, the customer is out, the part is wrong, or the job overruns into a second visit. Rescheduling, part returns and second visits are where the real administrative time goes, and where generic products tend to be thin.

Working out what your current admin costs

Almost no installer we speak to has measured this, which makes it very hard to judge whether any product is worth it. The method below is deliberately simple and uses your numbers, not ours.

For one ordinary week — not your quietest, not your worst — ask the office to log time spent on four things: re-keying survey notes, chasing engineers for photographs and readings, assembling handover and certification packs, and correcting paperwork that came back wrong.

Then convert it. Multiply the weekly total by 4.33 to get a month. Divide that by 162.5, the hours in one UK full-time month, and you have the answer expressed in whole people. We set out where that 162.5 figure comes from and how to use it honestly in a separate article.

A worked example, with made-up inputs so you can substitute your own. An installer with six engineers finds the office spends 9 hours a week re-keying and chasing, and 5 hours a week assembling packs. That is 14 hours a week → 14 × 4.33 ≈ 61 hours a month → 61 ÷ 162.5 ≈ 0.37 of a full-time person, spent entirely on moving information that already existed somewhere else.

Those numbers are illustrative. The method is the point. Run it with your own three figures before you look at a single demonstration, because it tells you what a solution is worth to you — and whether the honest answer is "tighten the current process" rather than "buy something".

Off-the-shelf or built for you?

Both are legitimate. The question is which part of your business you are willing to change.

Buy off-the-shelf when your process is close to standard, you are prepared to adapt to the product, and no part of how you work is a competitive advantage worth preserving. It is faster and the ongoing cost is predictable.

Have something built when the thing that makes your business work — the survey-to-commissioning chain, the way you handle subcontract labour, the specific scheme evidence you produce — is exactly the thing a generic product would force you to abandon. Bending your operation to fit a product can cost more in lost efficiency than the product saves.

Most installers sit between the two, which is why we send someone to look before anyone quotes anything. A day on site with the people doing the work tells you which parts genuinely need building and which parts a standard product would cover perfectly well. Some of what comes back is "you do not need us for that".

What a connected system looks like in practice

For an installer, the useful shape is usually four things sharing one record:

• Survey and quote — the survey produces the quote; nothing is re-typed.
• Scheduling and dispatch — the accepted quote becomes a scheduled job with the right engineer, the right kit and the right duration.
• The engineer's app — offline-first, capturing readings, photographs and serial numbers as structured evidence rather than as a camera roll.
• Compliance and handover — the pack assembles itself from evidence already captured, and flags what is missing before the job can close.

Everything else — invoicing, aftercare, stock in the van — hangs off those four. If you want the longer version, we have written up what a whole-company platform for installers covers.