How should an EV and solar installer track jobs from enquiry to commissioning?
As a defined set of stages, with one named owner per stage and an automatic report on anything that's sat still too long. A domestic solar job runs through roughly a dozen states between the enquiry and the grant landing in the customer's account, and around half of them depend on somebody outside your business — SEAI, a BER assessor, the network operator, a scaffolder. Most installers track this in a spreadsheet, which is fine at recording where a job is and useless at telling you when a job has stopped moving. The stopping is what costs you.
Solar has the longest job lifecycle in domestic trades
This is worth stating plainly because it explains everything else.
A boiler swap is quoted, booked, fitted, invoiced. Four states. A window job runs to maybe six. A grant-funded domestic solar install looks more like this: enquiry, survey booked, survey done, quote sent, quote accepted, grant application submitted, grant approved, deposit taken, equipment ordered, scaffold booked, install, network notification and commissioning, post-works BER assessment, Declaration of Works submitted, grant paid, final balance settled.
Fifteen or sixteen states, of which the grant approval, the BER assessment, the network paperwork and the scaffold are all outside your control. Add an EV charger to the same customer and you've got a second grant on a different timeline running alongside.
No business runs that reliably out of one person's memory. Most try.
Where jobs actually get stuck
Waiting on grant approval. The job is sold, the customer is excited, and nothing can legitimately start because works must not begin before approval is in place. It's the right rule, but the job sits in a state that feels like progress and isn't.
Waiting on the customer. A document, a photo of a meter, confirmation of something. Requested once and then forgotten. This is the single most common resting place for a stalled solar job.
Waiting on the BER assessor. A third-party diary, usually not booked until after the install, which adds weeks to a stage nobody is watching.
Waiting on the network. Connection and commissioning paperwork on its own timeline.
Waiting on nobody in particular. The worst category. The job finished, someone meant to file the Declaration of Works, and nobody did. Meanwhile the eight-month completion window is quietly running down.
Why a spreadsheet isn't enough
A spreadsheet answers "where is this job?" perfectly well. It cannot answer "which jobs have stopped moving?" unless someone reads every row and remembers what the dates mean.
That's the whole problem in one sentence. Job tracking isn't a recording problem, it's an exception-detection problem. You don't need to look at the forty jobs progressing normally. You need the four that haven't moved in a fortnight to raise their hand.
There's a second failure. A spreadsheet is a single file that one person owns and everyone else asks about. The installer on site can't update it, the office can't see what happened this morning, and the owner ends up as the human API between the two.
What to build
Define the stages once and don't invent more. Twelve to sixteen states, written down, everybody using the same names. Vague stages like "in progress" are where jobs go to hide.
Give every stage an owner. Not a department — a person. Any stage owned by "the office" is owned by nobody.
Set an expected duration per stage. Grant approval takes roughly this long. Scaffold takes roughly this. Anything exceeding its expected duration appears on a list automatically.
Run one exception report weekly. Jobs stalled beyond expected duration, sorted by value. Two minutes to read. This single artefact replaces most of the chasing that currently happens by memory.
Automate the customer-side chase. Where the block is a document from the homeowner, a short automated sequence collects it far more reliably than one email and a hope.
Track the grant deadline explicitly. Approved date plus the eight-month window, days remaining, visible. An expired grant is one of the few genuinely unrecoverable losses in this business, and it's entirely preventable.
Make it work on a phone. If an installer can't mark a job commissioned and attach photos from the driveway, the data will be a day late permanently, and a day-late system is one people stop trusting.
If the problem is further upstream — jobs never becoming orders in the first place — read why solar quotes stall between survey and order. For the money specifically hiding inside the grant process, read how much SEAI grant admin actually costs per job.
Where OrderWolf fits
We build the stage model around how your jobs actually run, set the expected durations, wire the customer document chases so they fire without anyone deciding to, and put the exception report in your inbox weekly. One CRM holding every job, visible to the office and the vans, with live margin tracking underneath so you can see what each job type actually makes once the admin is counted.
With GEV, our Irish flagship client, the team recovered roughly 2.5 admin hours per person per day over a three-month deployment. Results from one installer — yours depend on your job mix, your volume and your starting point.
We work with one installer per region in EV and solar, so availability is limited by area.
Common questions
See where your jobs are actually stuck
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