Migrating from Scoop Solar to Payaca: what actually moves

The Scoop account we migrated this year had been built by one person, field by field, over several years. That's the first thing to understand about leaving Scoop. You're not moving data out of a product. You're moving data out of a system your own team designed, and the person who designed it knows exactly where every field lives and why.

So this isn't a guide about whether to leave Scoop. It's what we learned doing it: what you can get out, how Scoop's model maps onto Payaca's, what comes across cleanly, what we rebuilt instead of copying, and how long it took. The customer's sales team ran Zoho in front of Scoop, so Zoho is covered here too.

Who this is for

Solar and battery businesses that use Scoop to run the work after the sale, and a separate CRM (in our case Zoho) for leads and deals. Usually the ops manager or the person who built the Scoop setup is the one reading this, because they'll be the one doing the mapping.

If Scoop and your CRM are both working for you, you probably don't need this. The teams that move are tired of a job living in two places, rebuilt by hand when a deal closes.

What you actually get out of Scoop

Two very different things come out of a Scoop account, and you need both.

The configuration. Before touching any data we audited the customer's Scoop setup with their team and exported its full structure. Here's roughly what one mid-sized solar operation had:

• Six phases (Scoop calls them apps): sales opportunity, site survey, engineering/utility/permitting, installation, inspection and PTO, plus a parallel service app
• Around 60 statuses across those phases, 17 of them in engineering/utility/permitting alone, with loops back for utility rejections and design changes
• Over 600 fields. The inspection and PTO form alone had more than 200
• Around 130 conditional display rules that show, hide or require fields based on other answers
• 18 shared pick-lists (inverter type, panel model, adders, pass/fail and so on), some with per-choice flags that ask for a comment, a photo or a task when that option is picked
• Around 130 status automations: emails, tasks, crew assignments, comments, texts, and the handoffs that create the next phase's record

We then reconciled our audit against the ops manager's own spreadsheet of fields. It matched one for one. Do this. It's the fastest way to get the person who built the old system to trust the new one.

The data. Project records came from the customer's own CSV export of Scoop. One thing to know early: in Scoop, only sold projects existed. Everything before the sale lived in Zoho, and a closed-won deal in Zoho created the Scoop project. So your Scoop export is your sold book, and your CRM export is your pipeline. You'll want both, and you'll want to check one against the other.

The gap: the export we worked from didn't include a bulk download of photos and documents. Plan for job media separately rather than finding out at cutover.

How Scoop's model maps onto Payaca's

We looked at mirroring Scoop with a pipeline per phase, and chose a single solar pipeline with milestone stages instead, each phase's form sitting on the stage it belongs to. The owner wanted one view of every job from lead to PTO, and the fieldsets and automations turned out to be most of the work anyway, not the stage list.

The 17 engineering/utility/permitting statuses collapsed into three stages (design, utility, permitting) plus a status field that keeps the detail. A utility rejection is a move back a stage, not a separate status. Service became its own pipeline, because service work runs alongside a job's lifecycle rather than inside it.

ScoopPayaca

• Scoop: Customers in Scoop and Zoho becomes Payaca: Customers, with Customer Contacts and AddressesMatched across systems
• Scoop: A job's phase records (one per app) becomes Payaca: One project
• Scoop: Phases and statuses becomes Payaca: Stages in one solar pipelineDetailed permitting statuses kept in a status field
• Scoop: Phase forms becomes Payaca: Fieldsets on the project
• Scoop: Shared pick-lists becomes Payaca: Select options
• Scoop: Status automations becomes Payaca: Automations and stage checklistsCustomer emails one for one, most others consolidated or retired
• Scoop: Service app becomes Payaca: A service pipeline
• Scoop: Zoho open deals becomes Payaca: Projects at a pre-sale stageStale leads go straight to a closed stage
• Scoop: Photos and documents becomes Payaca: Kept in Scoop as an archive

What moves cleanly and what gets rebuilt

The automations are the one people worry about most, so here's what happened to them. Of the roughly 130, the five customer-facing emails came across one for one. Around 15 operational tasks were consolidated into four stage-entry checklists: install prep, photo review, inspection closeout and final invoicing. Vendor emails for suppliers they no longer used, per-stage auto comments and anything Scoop itself marked as not live were dropped. Finance-specific tasks and rework alerts were deferred until the team agreed how they wanted those to run.

Where Zoho fits

Zoho held leads and deals. The decision was that Payaca would own pre-sale too, so the solar pipeline starts at lead and runs through consult, design, proposal and sold before the operations stages begin. Scoop's own sales-opportunity form came across as a pre-sale fieldset.

The Zoho side had around 7,000 leads. A few hundred were recent enough to matter, and fewer than 200 were open deals. We imported the open deals first, as projects at their current stage. Older leads came across only after cleanup, and anything stale went straight to a closed stage so it didn't clutter the live pipeline. Zoho stays available for reference. Zoho's lead sources and lead statuses came across as fields, so reps could still filter by where a lead came from.

Two things from the Zoho export caught us out. Some contacts had no address, or had a mailing address that wasn't the site address, so both needed handling. And the first test batch of ten had two errors: a duplicate name, and a record that had been filed in the wrong place in Zoho to begin with. That's why you import a small batch first, log every source ID, and only then do the rest.

How we ran it

Early July, audit and model. Export the Scoop configuration, reconcile it with the person who built it, and decide the pipeline model. We had the audit and the model decision inside the first week.

July to September, build and test with mock jobs. We built the survey and install forms first, because those are the ones the field teams live in. The ops manager ran mock projects through it and sent back four issues on the first pass: duplicated fields between the survey and install forms, fields he expected to appear only in some cases, file fields that took photos but not PDFs, and a redundant section. The install visit now checks the surveyor's system details instead of asking for them again. Permitting and PTO forms came second.

Customers, before go-live. The same customer existed under slightly different names in different systems. We matched records by email, phone and address, used the accounting records as the base, and kept a note of where each record came from.

Mid-September, solar live. New solar jobs started and were invoiced in Payaca from day one, with invoices syncing to QuickBooks. Jobs already invoiced in QuickBooks finished out there. Scoop became a reference archive.

Mid-October, sales off Zoho. Open deals imported, sales team trained, and a planned two-week overlap before Zoho was closed to new work. Lead feeds that used to land in Zoho were pointed at Payaca.

From kickoff in early July to solar live was a little over ten weeks. The sales cutover took about another month. That's for a business with several lines of work and a heavily customized Scoop setup. A simpler setup should be quicker, but we'd only promise that after seeing yours.

What we learned

Audit the live configuration, not the team's memory. The team told us they used four customer emails. The live config had five. The one they'd forgotten was the welcome email every new customer gets.

Don't port the conditional rules. Nearly 130 rules is a sign the form is doing too much. Grouping related fields (battery jobs get a battery section, multi-array roofs get a section per array) removed most of them, and the forms got easier to fill in.

Shared pick-lists need care. Scoop reuses one list (pass/fail, say) across dozens of fields. Rebuild the actual values from the export rather than retyping them, and check which lists were really shared and which just had the same name.

Decide the invoicing rule before go-live. New jobs invoice from the new system, open jobs finish in the old one. Mixing them is how you get duplicate jobs in your accounting.

Close old leads on the way in. Thousands of stale leads make a new pipeline look busy and useless. Bring the open deals across first, and put anything stale straight into a closed stage.

A real example

A US solar, battery and electrical contractor with a few dozen staff moved its solar business over in 2026. Sales leads lived in Zoho, closed deals were rebuilt in Scoop, and invoices were typed into QuickBooks by hand. Around 2,000 projects came across from Scoop and Zoho with their history attached. Solar went live in mid-September and the sales team followed in October. A month after go-live, their solar ops manager's main point to the sales team was simple: in Scoop, opening a site survey meant a stack of new tabs, and now the whole project runs from one screen.

It isn't finished. Other parts of the business are still moving over, and the sales stages are being trimmed. But solar runs in one place, and Scoop and Zoho are now something they look things up in, not something they work in.

If you're weighing it up

If you're the person who built your Scoop setup, you already have the hardest part of this migration in your head. Book a walkthrough and we'll map your Scoop setup with you, phase by phase, including what we'd collapse, what we'd keep and what we'd leave behind. If you're still comparing the two products, our Payaca vs Scoop Solar comparison covers the differences.

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Related reading

• Why solar companies are leaving Salesforce (and what they switch to)

Moving from something else?

• Migrating from ServiceTitan to Payaca
• Migrating from SolarNexus to Payaca
• Migrating from HubSpot to Payaca
• Switching to Payaca: every guide, plus what to do if your system isn't listed

Scoop Solar and Zoho are trademarks of their owners. Payaca isn't affiliated with or endorsed by either.