“The whole team's enjoying using the system.”
Jack Larsson
Director, Better Planet
Background
This install business does heat pumps (air and ground source), solar, batteries and ventilation, mostly on comprehensive renovations and new builds alongside architects. Most projects involve more than one technology, and the gap between deposit and install is often a year or more. The team is in the 20–30 range, with office staff, sales engineers and a field team of electricians and heating engineers.
The challenge
Sales lived in Pipedrive, installs and servicing lived in Commusoft, and payments were tracked on a dashboard and a whiteboard. Most jobs mix two or more technologies and run for months, so nobody had one view of a customer from enquiry to handover.
Why Payaca
They'd only moved to Commusoft at the start of 2025, and the directors knew the team had change fatigue. But the business was shifting towards account management and architect-led work, and Commusoft's opportunity-to-proposal flow didn't fit. What they wanted was one tool for the sales pipeline and the field. Payaca did both, at a similar price.
Two systems and a whiteboard
Before the switch, a lead came in through a website form and landed in Pipedrive as a note. Someone read it and set the lead source by hand. Once a customer signed, the job moved over to Commusoft for scheduling, installation and servicing. Design happened in other tools again.
The joins showed. Sales kept their dashboard in Pipedrive and a whiteboard of customers they were waiting on for payment. In the field, an engineer in Commusoft could only see his own bookings. To find out who else was on a job that day, he had to switch between colleagues one by one.
“We wanted something that brought Pipedrive and the field service side into one tool.”
Director, on why they started looking (before switching)
Switching over in six weeks
Onboarding started in late November 2025, with a hard stop: Commusoft data had to be out before the contract ended at Christmas. Payaca mapped their workflow first, then built pipelines for installs, servicing and survey payments, with stages that match how the team actually works.
On the sales side, the team trimmed open Pipedrive deals from around 300 to under 200 before importing them, so only live opportunities came across. Notes from old and lost deals went onto the contact record, so a returning customer's history is still there. The website forms were pointed at Payaca, and the business went live in January 2026.
How the work runs now
A website lead lands in the right pipeline and the team gets an alert. If a quote has sat for seven days, Payaca flags it for follow-up. Proposals go out from Payaca, and the team gets a heads-up the moment one is accepted. When a job moves into design, the design tasks get raised automatically. When an install is booked, the right people hear about it.
Compliance has its own set of automations: pre-start checks two weeks before an install, a prompt to register the insurance-backed warranty when a contract is signed, and a paperwork check seven days after the install finishes. Invoices sent from Payaca sync to Xero, and a fully paid invoice moves the project to complete. On the servicing side, finishing a job creates the repeat project, and it moves to 'due' a month before the next visit.
The field team works from the Payaca mobile app, and in summer 2026 they started moving their time recording over from their old tool too.
“Payaca is at the centre of our tech stack, and it's staying there.”
Director, on the company's wider tech stack, October 2026
The results
Sales and field service now run in one system. Commusoft is gone, and Pipedrive is down to a single seat kept for one revenue report.
More than 70 live automations handle lead alerts, quote follow-ups, design and install-prep tasks, compliance checkpoints, invoicing status and repeat service jobs. They've fired more than 5,700 times this year.
What they use in Payaca
- Pipeline management
- Automations
- Interactive proposals
- Mobile app
- Time tracking
- Invoicing
- Xero & QuickBooks
- Agent Dave
Looking ahead
Sales have kept growing, and the directors want to handle that without simply adding headcount. Next up: making Payaca the single source of project data that feeds their compliance paperwork, a sales dashboard to retire the last Pipedrive seat, and a clearer visit history for engineers in the field app.
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