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Things to Consider When Choosing Solar Software
Introduction, Benefits and Key Features for Solar Software Solutions
Solar software solutions help companies reduce their operational costs and increase efficiency. Moreover, it is a set of business tools that can help make the company more competitive in today’s market. A few of the tools that are helpful to a modern solar company include sales & project management, material management and procurement, and design software tools.
Solar Business Software: Why is it Important Today?
Solar software is a system that manages and optimizes the entire process of implementing a solar project. It covers all aspects of the project from proposal to installation, with core layers including Solar Proposal Tool, CRM, Project Management, Field Operations Management and Customer Experience Software.
As residential and commercial solar installation businesses are accelerating growth and expanding their customer base to meet market demand, they tend to get stymied and face challenges with their own internal processes and business applications.
To highlight the issue, reducing soft costs is the number one priority for most solar installers. Soft costs, which according to the US Department of Energy is at around 66% of solar project costs in the US, can come from various sources like data entry errors, inventory mismanagement, changing customer acquisition costs, delayed invoicing and so on. Out-of-date information flows between cross-functional departments can impede management’s ability to timely respond. Without reliable, real-time data providing visibility across all company operations, scaling productively and profitably is next to impossible.
To accommodate the changing workspace and embrace growth, installers will need unified solar software applications that bring together their accounting, supply chain management, project management, CRM, marketing and fulfillment systems in one cohesive system. Only then can companies see their cash flows and measure efficiencies across multiple areas. The solution also alerts them to specific areas of deviation from plan so that they can then zero in on problem areas or opportunities to maximize revenues—be it soft costs, hard costs or any other revenue-related measure.
Solar Design Software
In addition to solar business software, you also need to have good solar design software.
A solar design software helps companies in the photovoltaic industry use technology to its fullest. It can provide support for designing and managing projects from the first stage all the way to installation, incorporating software-based tools that help calculate performance and energy output.
Solar design tools also benefit businesses by:
- reducing cost of installing PV systems
- mitigating risk with smaller project sizes
and most importantly, helping reduce business costs associated with renewable energy by helping you get more out of your solar PV system.
With a solar design software like Aurora, you can create a complete engineering design and sales proposal with just an address and an electric bill.
Benefits of Solar Software
Solar software, comprised of a fully integrated suite of customized applications for solar installers and contractors, is a great alternative to using spreadsheets and standalone generic applications like QuickBooks, as it provides a single source of truth for accounting, inventory, project management, sales management & CRM, asset and field service operations. This makes it easy for the management and staff to have real-time visibility across all business operations as well as a unified view of their customers, while significantly reducing IT support costs, allowing for accelerated business expansion and revenue growth.
Things to Consider When Choosing Solar Software Solutions
Solar Installers can improve productivity and profitability using an end-to-end solution specifically optimized for your businesses. Here are a few things to evaluate while considering solar business software:
Usability
While choosing a solar software solution, you will encounter various options claiming to do everything except installation. The value of an all-in-one tool diminishes when it requires intense training of staff. Look for an option that is easy to get started. It should come with industry specific templates and formats that enable rapid deployment.
If your software is easy to use, the members in the team should be able to master it quickly. Consider using a platform that offers a variety of roles and permissions, while ensuring security.
Adaptability
With the advent of Covid-19, solar companies faced challenges of the ease in which they conducted business. On-site visits and in-person meetings weren’t possible during this period. Good software should adapt to the changing situations and requirements. The core solar business software should also allow for adaptation to new industry standards and mandates.
Customization
When choosing the right solar software for your company, make sure that while it is specifically designed for the solar business’ needs and best practices, it is also easily customizable to suit your company’s operations and growth.
Solar software systems must be state of the art to avoid being hostage by outdated, incompatible software.
3rd Party Software Integration
There are many software applications in the industry which serve multiple needs of a solar installation business such as lead generation, proposals, payments, file storage, asset monitoring, warehouse management, and the like. A comprehensive solar software solution must provide seamless integration to these third-party applications to increase its functionality and meet the business needs.
Blu Banyan’s Smart Solar Software Solutions for Your Business
Blu Banyan has vast experience across the solar industry. Our expertise ranges across the board from variation in solar financing documentation to challenges of customer acquisition. We offer smart solar solutions for your business, from NetSuite to SolarSucess to bluChat.
SolarSuccess, is an award-winning software application suite optimized for residential and commercial solar installers, as well as utility scale solar projects.
SolarSucess Solar ERP includes solar asset management software, solar project management software, solar sales & CRM software, solar inventory management software, solar service management software, solar accounting software, and integrations to 3rd party software.
“When you’re working with incompatible, incomplete or out-of-date data, it can turn into a nightmare pretty quickly. To improve efficiency, productivity and profitability, solar installers must have reliable visibility into their entire end-to-end businesses.”
Solar software is a must-have tool for any solar company, regardless of size or location. It can help your business grow by increasing leads, boosting design and proposal creation capabilities, and managing customers and assets with ease.
Industry-leading Support for Solar Companies
We pride ourselves on our technical support team who are available to answer any questions or concerns you may have. With a dedicated development team working on your success, we’ll always be there when you need us most.