DNO 'further information required': what happens next

An application comes back marked "further information required" and there is nothing on the screen to click. No form, no upload box, no message telling you which detail is missing. It reads like a rejection and behaves like a dead end, so it sits there while somebody waits for the portal to tell them what to do next.

It is not a rejection, and the portal is not where the answer is going to arrive.

What the status actually means

Every G99 application you submit goes to your Distribution Network Operator through ENA Connect, and comes back with a status describing where it sits in their process. Most of those statuses are procedural: awaiting assessment, under assessment, approved.

"Further information required" means an assessor has picked the application up, started work on it, and found something they need before they can finish. That is the whole of it. The application has not failed, it has not been sent back, and it does not need resubmitting. It is a live application with an open question attached.

Three statuses get confused with each other, and the response to each is completely different:

• Further information required. A paperwork gap. Answer the question and the assessment continues from where it stopped.
• DNO works required. The network itself does not have capacity, and the DNO has to do physical work before your system can connect. No document you send changes this.
• Failed. The submission itself did not go through, usually something like an unreadable cut-out image. This one genuinely does need resubmitting.

Only the third is a dead end, and it is the one people assume the first is.

Nothing to submit through the portal

This is the part that traps people, and it is worth being blunt about it: the DNO comes to you. They collect the outstanding information from the installer directly, outside ENA Connect, using the contact details on the application. There is no portal step, no upload, no button in Payaca or anywhere else that discharges the request, so waiting in the application for an instruction to appear is waiting for something that will never arrive.

The government's own guidance for installation contractors describes the same two outcomes: the network operator will be in touch to approve the installation, or to make further contact about amendments needed. Both arrive as contact, not as a portal state.

So the practical instruction is unglamorous. Check the inbox and the phone line belonging to whoever is named on the application. In a lot of installation businesses that is a shared estimating or admin mailbox rather than the person tracking the job, which is exactly how a DNO email asking for an inverter datasheet sits unopened for a fortnight while the project manager watches a status that never changes.

What it does to your timeline

Under Ofgem's guaranteed standards for distributed generation connections, a network operator has 45 working days to provide a low voltage generation quotation and 65 working days for high voltage and extra high voltage, with a payment due to the customer for each working day they run over. The Energy Networks Association's own connection guide states the same two figures, and they still sit in the DNOs' published standards of performance for 2026/27.

The number everyone quotes is the 45. The mechanism behind it is the bit that matters here. Ofgem's guidance on those standards sets the start date by the receipt of all the necessary information, and defines a formal "clock pause" for any point where the operator cannot make further progress because it is waiting on an external event. The first example it gives is waiting for relevant further information from the customer in order to process a quotation.

So the fortnight you spend tracking down a protection settings sheet does not come out of the 45 working days. It sits outside them. An application that takes six weeks of DNO assessment and three weeks of waiting on you took nine weeks, and the operator met the standard. This is why "further information required" deserves a same-day response even though nothing about the status looks urgent: it is the only part of the timeline you control, and while it is open, the clock you are counting on is not running.

What they usually want

Most requests are dull, which is what makes them frustrating. The G99 application asks for the installer's details and qualifications and full information on the proposed equipment, so the gaps tend to be in the same places: an inverter or battery model that cannot be matched to a type test certificate, a single-line diagram that does not agree with the declared capacity, or protection settings left at a default that does not match the equipment named elsewhere on the form.

One catch is worth knowing because it has nothing to do with the equipment. EREC G99 requires the planned commissioning date on the application form to fall between 10 working days and 3 months from the date of submission. A date pulled from an optimistic project plan, or one left over from a copied application, is outside the window and gets queried. If you are submitting well ahead of a job that is not scheduled yet, that is the field to check before it comes back to you.

If export limitation is part of the design, the G100 detail is another common source of questions, because the limitation device and its settings have to be described in a way the assessor can verify rather than take on trust.

Reducing how often it happens

You cannot eliminate these, but most of the volume is self-inflicted and comes from the same handful of causes.

Get the route right before you submit. An application filed under the wrong recommendation gets queried on its way to being refiled. G98 or G99 is decided by 16A per phase across everything at the property, not per device, and the aggregate rule catches multi-technology jobs where the solar alone would have been fine. If a job sits near the line, check which route it needs before the paperwork goes anywhere.

Submit against the equipment you are actually installing. A specification that changes after submission and a specification that was wrong at submission produce the same query. If the design is still moving, it is cheaper to hold the application than to answer for it twice.

Give the DNO a contact who is watching. Since the request arrives by email or phone rather than through the portal, the named contact is doing real work in this process. Put someone on it who reads that inbox daily.

Make the status visible to the person responsible for the job. Wiring an automation to DNO status changes turns the status into a task or a notification for the person who owns the project, rather than something discovered on a Friday when someone opens the application to check on something else. For a business running enough connection applications that no one person can hold them all in their head, that visibility across the whole pipeline is the difference between a query answered in a day and one answered in a month. It is also the specific thing a general-purpose CRM tends not to do, which is worth weighing if you are comparing systems on compliance rather than on contact management.

While it is open

Do not resubmit. A duplicate application does not answer the question and gives somebody a tidying job later. The original stays where it is, with its place in the assessment queue, and continues once you have replied.

Do tell the customer something true. "The DNO has come back with a question about the inverter and we are answering it today" is a better message than silence, and it is a much better message than the one you have to send later if the query sat unopened.

And treat it as live in whatever system you run the job from. A status the team reads as a failure is a status nobody chases, which is the failure mode this creates far more often than the missing document itself. Payaca tracks "further information required" as an application still in progress rather than a failure, and keeps polling for the decision in the background so the outcome finds you rather than the other way round. The application was never stuck. It was waiting for a reply that nobody knew had been asked for.