A buyer's guide to field service management software for UK solar, heat pump and battery installers, and why the generic trades platforms stop short of MCS and DNO work.
Ben Clarke
Search "field service management software" and you'll land on the same list every time: platforms built for plumbers, electricians, cleaners and general trades, all claiming to handle scheduling, invoicing and dispatch for "any field service business." That's true, as far as it goes. What it doesn't tell you is what happens when your jobs aren't a one-visit boiler repair, but a six-week project that runs from survey to MCS certificate.
I've worked with installers moving off three or four different setups a year - a scheduling tool, a separate invoicing package, a spreadsheet for tracking DNO applications, a shared drive for compliance photos - because no single platform covered the whole job. Here's how to think about the category properly, and where clean tech work breaks the generic tools.
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FSM software is a broad category. At its core, most platforms in this space handle the same handful of things:
That covers a plumber fixing a leak or an electrician doing a call-out. It's a single visit, a fixed job type, and the paperwork is an invoice. If that's your business, a general FSM tool will serve you fine, and there's no reason to pay for anything more specialised.
It doesn't cover what a solar, heat pump, battery or EV charger installation actually involves.
A residential solar installation isn't one job - it's a sequence: survey, design, quote, DNO application (G98 or G99 depending on system size), MCS-compliant installation, commissioning, and a certificate the customer needs for their paperwork and any export payments. A heat pump job adds an EPC and heat loss calculation before you can even quote accurately, and increasingly a BUS grant application that has to be tracked and reconciled against the invoice. Battery-only and hybrid jobs stack several of these together.
None of that is a "field service visit" in the sense general FSM platforms are built around. Three gaps show up consistently when installers try to run clean tech work through a generic tool:
Compliance isn't a checkbox, it's a workflow. A DNO application, an MCS certificate, and a BUS grant claim are all conditional, multi-step processes with their own timelines and failure states. Generic FSM platforms have a "job status" field. They don't have a place to track that a G99 application is submitted but awaiting a response, or that an MCS certificate can't be generated until commissioning photos are uploaded.
The office and the field need the same live picture. A purpose-built scheduling and mobile app pairing shares one source of truth: a survey, an install, and a commissioning visit are separate calendar events on the same project, each with its own task checklist and materials list, so the installer on-site sees exactly what to load in the van and what's already been done on earlier visits - not a generic "job" with no project history behind it.
Materials aren't a line item, they're a supply chain problem. Panels, inverters, cylinders and heat pump units get ordered in advance, allocated to specific jobs, and sometimes requested from site when something doesn't turn up or fails inspection. A generic FSM tool treats materials as an invoice line. It has no concept of a materials list attached to a scheduled event that an installer can check against before they've even left the yard.
Whichever platform you're evaluating - a generic FSM tool, an industry CRM, or a purpose-built clean tech platform - run it against these questions rather than a feature checklist:
Most general FSM platforms answer none of the first three well, because they weren't built to. That's not a criticism of them - they're built for a different job. It's a reason to be specific about what you're buying software to do before you sign up for a year's contract.
If you're evaluating platforms right now, write down the last three jobs that went wrong because information didn't reach the right person - a materials list that didn't make it to the installer, a DNO status nobody chased, a certificate that took three phone calls to track down. Test any shortlist against fixing those, not against a generic feature list.
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