Every booked survey is attached to a named installation, so the crew arrives knowing what the surveyor actually saw rather than what the customer remembered describing.
Solar installers and rooftop integrators
Installers of rooftop and small commercial systems — a regional installer running its own sales team and crews, a dealer working under somebody else's brand, or an electrician who added solar to an existing trade and now has a pipeline to manage.
The problem
The homeowner who calls has usually already decided they want solar. What they are doing is comparing three or four installers across a process they drive, and the two things on their desk that are not you are a loan decision and a view about their own roof. So the job rarely turns on how quickly you answered. It turns on whether the survey was booked, whether your proposal is a document a person can lay beside three others and compare, and whether anybody can say what stage that customer is at when they ring back six weeks later. Then the crew has finished, commissioning is done, and the documents the customer needs for their own paperwork are in a folder on someone's desk, because nothing in the business owns them.
A working day
You start with the surveys booked for the week rather than with an enquiry, because the survey is the gate. One proposal has to go out today because a customer is reading it against quotes issued yesterday. A crew is on a roof and the structure is not what the survey said. An instalment is due from a customer who is waiting on a bank, and the honest position is that you do not know when that clears. And the owner wants to know which of the systems sold last month actually made money.
How NoxOrigin fits this business
Every business runs the same sequence, from first contact to money in. NoxOrigin keeps each step tied to the last: Customer → Opportunity → Quote → Project → Work → Invoice → Payment.
The steps are the same. What changes is the words you use for them, the pressure at each one, and who is responsible for it. This is how it reads for solar installers.
Enquiry
Customer → Opportunity
A rooftop enquiry is not a cold lead, and it is not about the panel either — the second question is almost always the number on the sheet and when it pays for itself. So the record that matters is an owner and a next action, not another row in a list of unowned numbers.
Site survey
Project
The survey is the gate, and the roof is where a sale dies: shading, a structural doubt, an unusable meter board, a terrace that is not the terrace in the photograph. What the surveyor saw has to belong to the installation, because the proposal is written from it and the crew works to it.
System proposal
Quote
A solar proposal is a comparison document. Three or four of them get laid side by side and read for layout, warranty, payment structure, and price. A proposal that is a picture of a quote cannot survive that exercise, so the priced system has to be structured line items with a tax treatment attached.
Agreement and deposit
Invoice
Acceptance is the agreement and the deposit is the first money event, raised against the accepted quote. There is no contract editor and no e-signature in NoxOrigin: the signed contract is your own document, and what the system holds is the priced system the customer agreed to and the invoice for the advance.
Installation and commissioning
Work
The installation is a delivery job with a date, a crew, and a result the customer will be living with. Work recorded against it is what commissioning and handover are built from, and a change the customer asks for after the survey is a new quote raised against the same installation rather than an edit to the original one.
Payment and subsidy paperwork
Payment
The final payment, the instalment schedule, and the documents the customer needs for their own claim all land here. NoxOrigin records the money and can record the document handover as work on the installation. It does not assess eligibility for any subsidy or credit, does not register anything with an authority, and does not file returns — that is a regulatory question, and it belongs with an adviser rather than with a software vendor.
Installer economics
Reports
Quoted against billed, and billed against collected, installation by installation, is what shows whether a system size or a sales channel is worth doing again. What it cannot show is labour: there is no timesheet record, so a job that quietly ate three extra crew days looks exactly like one that did not.
What changes
What is different by next week.
The proposal is priced line items in the system, which is the only form that survives being compared against three other proposals on one table.
A change found after the survey becomes a new quote on the same installation, so the additional items carry a price the customer has already seen before the final bill.
A deposit or instalment is a dated payment against a specific invoice, so a customer waiting on a bank is a promise with a date on it rather than a customer who has gone quiet.
You can see which enquiries became installations and which proposals were simply compared and lost, which is the only way to find out whether a slow first reply actually cost you the job.
Who does what
Different people need different parts of the same information.
Everyone is looking at the same information. What changes is which part of it they are responsible for.
- Sales / site surveyorAnswers the enquiry, books and attends the survey, and writes the proposal the customer is going to put next to three others.
- Installer / crew leadWorks the installation to what the survey found, and reports the part of it that no survey could have told them in advance.
- Project coordinatorChases the survey slot, the proposal, the paperwork the customer needs, and the instalments — the chain between the sale and the last payment.
- Owner / principalDecides which proposals and channels are worth taking again, and which customers to chase when their own financing has stalled.
What software should not decide
NoxOrigin keeps the facts. You still make the decisions.
Keeping the facts in one place ends the argument about what happened. It does not make the decisions that were always yours to make.
- Whether to chase a customer whose financing has stalled or leave them be. Chasing costs sales time and can read as pressure; leaving them alone can hand the job to whoever asked next.
- How long to hold a survey slot for someone who has not yet said yes. Holding it costs a crew day you could sell; releasing it can lose the job that was three weeks from signing.
- Whether to absorb a small extra found on the roof rather than raise a second quote. It protects the relationship once and sets the expectation twice.
- Whether to fund a sales channel whose enquiries are large and whose close rate is not, which your own pipeline answers and no general rule does.
- Whether to hand over the documents a customer needs promptly or wait until they ask. Prompt costs coordinator time; waiting can push their timeline behind yours and lose the next one.
Free tools
What this trade tends to ask, answered with a calculator.
Slow lead response cost calculator for solar installers
This trade's version of the question is genuinely awkward, and the page says so: a customer who has gone quiet may be waiting on a loan rather than lost to a faster reply. It is an upper bound until your own pipeline supports it.
Scope change cost calculator
What the extra work found on the roof costs before you quote it — the additional effort and materials, the contingency, and the price that holds the margin you quoted at.
Where to look next
The product areas this depends on.
Customers & CRM
The enquiry, the comparison stage, and the customer who rings back six weeks later, on one record.
Projects & Work
The survey, the installation, and the commissioning work behind the handover.
Quotes, Billing & Finance
The system proposal, the deposit invoice, and the final bill raised from the same priced structure.
Payment promises and ageing
The deposit, the instalments, and the balance somebody is still waiting on a bank for.
Before you look at pricing.
Do you handle subsidy or tax credit paperwork and eligibility?
No. NoxOrigin does not assess eligibility for any subsidy or credit, does not register a system with an authority, and does not file returns. It records the invoice, the payment, and the handover of documents as work on the installation. What a customer is eligible for is a regulatory and financial question, and it should be confirmed with an adviser rather than with a software vendor.
Can the customer sign the agreement inside NoxOrigin?
Not as a signature. There is no contract editor and no e-signature. The accepted proposal is the agreement, and it is a structured quote with line items and a tax treatment; the signed contract stays your own document, and the priced system it refers to is the record the deposit and the final invoice are raised from.
Does it do system design, shading analysis, or module sizing?
No. Sizing, shading analysis, structural assessment, and the design file are engineering work and belong in the tools your surveyors already use. What NoxOrigin carries is the chain around the design: the enquiry, the survey as a job record, the proposal as a priced quote, the installation, the invoices, and the payments.
Do you record crew hours so we can see the true cost of a job?
No. There is no timesheet record and no payroll module, and the work record will not pretend to be one. Job economics therefore come from quoted against billed and billed against collected per installation. If recorded labour hours per installation are what you need in order to judge which work to keep taking, that is a different product.
What happens when a customer asks for changes after the survey?
It becomes a new quote raised against the same installation, so the additional items carry a price and a tax treatment the customer has seen. There is no separate change-request record type; the installation's commercial history is a sequence of quotes on one job rather than one document that kept being edited.