Payaca automations now fire on DNO application status changes and on every change proposal event, not just acceptance. How UK installers wire up the two mid-job waits that stall installs: grid applications and scope changes.
Jamie Duncan
Most installs don't stall at the start or the end. They stall in the middle, at one of two moments where the job is waiting on an answer and nobody owns the act of noticing it.
The first is the DNO. Your G99 application goes in, and then the job sits. When the answer finally lands, it lands quietly, and the install date, the kit order and the customer's patience all wait until someone checks. The second is the mid-job scope change. The customer wants a battery added, or drops the EV charger, and the change proposal you sent enters the same limbo: accepted, declined or ignored, with nobody chasing because everyone assumes someone else saw it.
Payaca's automation engine now covers both. DNO applications are an automation type with a status-change trigger, and change proposals now fire automations on every event in their life, not just acceptance. Here's how to wire them up.
If you already submit your G98 and G99 applications through Payaca, the application is a record on the job, which means automations can watch it. Create a custom automation, set the type to DNO application, and pick the one trigger it offers: Connection application status changed. It fires every time an application moves state.
Three recipes cover most of what installers need.
Tell the customer before they ring you. Add an email action to the primary contact. "We've had an update on your grid application" is a two-line template, and it converts the most common inbound call an ops desk gets during a solar job into a message that sends itself. If your customers prefer texts, the SMS action reaches the primary contact or site contacts.
Raise the next step as a task. Add a "Create task" action so that the day the application moves, someone has "book the install" or "review DNO response" sitting in their list. The point isn't the reminder itself. It's that the clock on the next step starts when the DNO answers, not when someone next checks the portal. On a job where the application decides your install date, those are different days more often than anyone likes to admit.
Tag the project. Add or remove a project tag on status change and your pipeline view can filter to every job currently waiting on a DNO, or every job that cleared one this week. That's a Monday-morning scheduling view rather than a spreadsheet someone maintains by hand.
If you'd like to see this running on a real pipeline before building it yourself, book a demo and we'll set one up with you.
Change proposals have supported automations for a while, but only on acceptance. That covered the happy path and ignored everything else that can happen to a variation. As of this month, change proposal automations fire on Created, Sent, Declined and Voided too.
The recipes worth building, in rough order of value:
Declined: get a call raised. A declined change proposal is a customer telling you the price or the scope missed, and it deserves a conversation within a day. Trigger on Declined, create a task for the assigned user to call, and tag the project so declined variations are visible on the board. Silence after a declined variation is how a £2,000 addition quietly becomes a competitor's job.
Accepted: start the work. Move the project to the right stage and create the tasks that follow: order the additional kit, adjust the schedule, update the install pack. If the change adds hardware with a lead time, the gap between "customer accepted" and "someone ordered it" is pure schedule slip, and this closes it.
Sent: give ops a heads-up. An internal email when a change proposal goes out means whoever runs the schedule knows scope might move before it formally does. One thing to know: the Sent trigger fires when the proposal is first sent or marked as sent, and does not fire again on a resend.
Voided: close the loop. If a variation gets voided, notify the assigned user so the job's paperwork and schedule get put back the way they were.
The automation engine is blunt by design, so three habits keep it safe.
Scope every automation with a condition. An automation with no conditions fires on every matching event in every pipeline across your account. Add "Pipeline is" so your solar recipes stay off your service work.
Test with a tag. There's no dry-run mode, so add a condition like "Project has tag 'Test'", run it against a single tagged project, and remove the condition once you've seen it behave.
Check the Activity panel, not your memory. Every automation action is recorded on the project's Activity feed, including failed runs. Filter it to Automation and you can see exactly what fired and when. That's the audit trail when a customer says they never got the update.
Nothing above wins you a new job. What it does is stop the jobs you've already won from drifting: the install that slipped a week because the DNO's answer sat unread, the declined variation nobody called about, the accepted one where the kit order started three days late. Those drifts don't show up in any one report, but they're the difference between a schedule that holds and one that's always being rescued.
If your team is still finding out about DNO responses and scope changes by checking, book a demo and we'll show you what it looks like when the job tells you instead.
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