Salesforce, HubSpot, and ServiceTitan weren't built for clean tech. Here's what happens when installers switch to a purpose-built platform.
Matt Franklin
I spent 90 minutes last week on a demo with a US solar and electrical services company. They're running four separate tools to manage their operations: ServiceTitan for field service, QuickBooks for accounting, Scoop for solar project management, and Zoho for their CRM. Four tools, four logins, four sets of data that don't talk to each other.
Their operations director said something I hear in almost every demo with a 20+ person installer: "We've got great tools, but none of them know about each other. My team spends more time entering data than doing work."
That company isn't unusual. It's the norm.
The typical journey goes like this. You start as a small installer using spreadsheets and WhatsApp. You grow to 10-15 people and realise you need a proper system. Someone recommends Salesforce or HubSpot because "everyone uses it."
You spend three to six months customising it. You pay a consultant to set up custom fields, workflows, and integrations. You train your team. And then you discover that the tool fundamentally doesn't understand what you do.
It doesn't know that a solar quote needs a system design. It doesn't know that your proposal needs to show panel layouts and energy yields. It doesn't know that after the customer accepts, you need to submit a DNO application before you can book the install. It doesn't know about MCS documentation, commissioning forms, or warranty registrations.
So you bolt things on. Zapier connections. Custom forms in Google Docs. A separate tool for DNO applications. Another one for design. Before you know it, you're back where you started - multiple systems, none of them connected.
When I say Payaca is built for clean tech installers, I don't mean we took a generic CRM and added some solar-specific fields. I mean the entire data model, the entire workflow engine, understands how installation businesses operate.
Proposals know about system design. A Payaca proposal isn't a generic quote with line items. It can include design integrations from EasyPV, Heatpunk, or OpenSolar. The customer sees a professional proposal with their system specs, energy projections, and payment options - not a spreadsheet in a PDF.
Compliance is built into the pipeline. In the UK, MCS documentation and DNO applications are part of your project workflow, not bolted-on afterthoughts. Your pipeline stages can enforce that compliance steps are completed before moving forward. In the US, permit tracking and AHJ requirements are built into the project flow.
One project, quote to payment. The project that starts as a lead and becomes a site survey is the same project that becomes a proposal, an accepted job, a scheduled installation, and a completed invoice. One record, one timeline, one source of truth. Your office team isn't reconciling data across three tools.
The subscription cost of running ServiceTitan plus QuickBooks plus Scoop plus a CRM is significant - often several thousand per month. But that's the smaller cost.
The bigger cost is operational. It's the office coordinator who spends an hour each morning copying data from the CRM into the scheduling tool. It's the invoice that goes out with the wrong address because someone typed it differently in two systems. It's the DNO application that gets delayed because the project data wasn't transferred from the sales system to the operations system.
For a business doing 30-50 installs a month, these inefficiencies add up to one or two full-time salaries worth of wasted effort. That's not a rounding error. That's the difference between hiring another engineer and not.
The businesses I talk to aren't making this change lightly. They've already invested time and money in their current tools. The switch is driven by pain that's become too expensive to ignore.
Onboarding typically takes one to two weeks. We migrate your customer data, set up your pipelines to match your actual workflow, configure your proposal templates with your branding and product catalogue, and connect your accounting and payment tools. Your team is using the system from day one, not after months of customisation.
The most common reaction from teams after the first week is relief. Not excitement about features - relief that they're working in one system instead of four.
If you're running a clean tech installation business with 10 or more people and your team is juggling multiple tools that don't connect, the problem is only going to get worse as you grow. More installs means more data entry, more reconciliation, and more opportunities for things to fall through the cracks.
Payaca was built to solve exactly this problem. Book a demo and see your actual workflow running in one system.
See how Payaca helps clean tech installers save time and grow their business.
Book a demo
ServiceTitan dominates field service, but it was built for HVAC. Here's an honest comparison of the alternatives for solar installers - including where each one is strong, where it falls short, and how to choose based on your business stage.
Ben Clarke, Account Executive at Payaca with 10+ years in field service management, explains why solar businesses keep abandoning Salesforce and generic CRMs - and what actually works instead.
A comprehensive guide to the software solar installation businesses use, from CRMs and field service tools to design platforms and compliance systems. Covers what to look for at every stage of growth.