MCS compliance, site surveys, system design, quoting, project tracking, and handover packs. Built around how solar, heat pump, and EV charger installers actually work.
A renewable energy installation is not a simple job. It starts with a lead, moves through a site survey, system design, quotation (often with finance options), customer sign-off, DNO notification, procurement, installation, commissioning, MCS certification, handover pack assembly, and warranty registration. Every step produces documentation that needs to be recorded, stored, and retrievable for years.
At minimum, installer software needs to handle:
More advanced systems also cover DNO application tracking, BUS grant management for heat pump installs, SEG registration for solar customers, battery storage monitoring integration, and customer portals where homeowners can view their system performance and documents.
The Microgeneration Certification Scheme is the gateway to the UK renewables market. Without MCS certification, your customers cannot access the Boiler Upgrade Scheme (up to £7,500 per heat pump), the Smart Export Guarantee for solar exports, or the 0% VAT rate on domestic energy-saving materials. Every serious installer in the UK is MCS certified, and every installation must produce a stack of compliant documentation.
Here is what MCS requires for each installation:
The number of MCS certified contractors has more than doubled since September 2022, when there were 2,563. By Q4 2025, that figure exceeded 5,600. The sector grew by 7% in 2025 alone, with 1,443 new installers gaining certification in 2024. Over 4,000 are now certified for solar PV, over 2,000 for heat pumps, and over 2,000 for battery storage. This growth means more competition, more installations, and more documentation to manage correctly.
Most software serving renewable energy installers charges monthly. The costs vary widely because the market is fragmented: you typically need one tool for design, another for CRM and project management, a third for field operations, and something else for compliance paperwork. The subscriptions add up quickly.
An installer paying £400 per month across multiple tools spends:
And at the end of those ten years, you own nothing. If you stop paying, you lose access. Your project records, customer data, compliance documents, and installation history are locked inside someone else's platform. In an industry where warranty obligations can stretch 10 to 25 years, losing access to installation records is not just inconvenient. It is a business risk.
Payaca, the most feature-complete dedicated platform for UK renewable installers, charges £299 per month for the Core plan. That is £3,588 per year, or £17,940 over five years. Their Growth plan at £1,199 per month reaches £71,940 over five years. On top of this, many installers still run a separate design tool, a separate accounting package, and manual spreadsheets for grant tracking.
The software landscape for UK renewable energy installers is fragmented. There is no single dominant platform equivalent to what TechMan or Garage Hive are for garages. Instead, installers piece together multiple tools. Here is what is available.
| Provider | What They Offer | Pricing |
|---|---|---|
| Payaca | The closest thing to an all-in-one platform for UK clean tech installers. CRM, MCS-compliant proposals, DNO support, job scheduling, invoicing, design tool integrations (OpenSolar, EasyPV). Covers solar, heat pumps, batteries, and EV chargers. | £299/month (Core) to £1,199/month (Growth). Annual billing reduces to £249 and £999 respectively. |
| Pylon | Solar design and proposal tool with CRM add-on. High-resolution imagery, financial projections, instant web and PDF proposals. Battery storage design on Pro tier. UK-focused. | £4/project (Standard) to £10/project (Pro). CRM add-on from $49/user/month. Free credits for 5 projects to start. |
| OpenSolar | Free solar design platform. System design, performance simulation, financial modelling, and proposals. Funded by hardware distributors and finance companies. Strong feature set at zero cost for the core platform. | Free (core platform). API access and third-party connectors charged from April 2026. |
| EasySolar | Solar design and CRM tool. Panel layout, shading analysis, financial calculations, and proposal generation. Integrates with Payaca for UK installers. | From $25/user/month (Basic, min. 2 users). $35/user/month (Plus, min. 10 users). |
| Reonic | End-to-end platform for renewable installers covering lead management, CRM, project design, procurement, and billing. German-founded, expanding into the UK market. Raised €13m Series A in 2024. | Contact for pricing. Demo-based sales process. |
| Provider | What They Offer | Pricing |
|---|---|---|
| SolarEdge Designer | Free web-based solar design tool for SolarEdge certified installers. System layout, performance simulation, and component specification. Locked to SolarEdge equipment. | Free (SolarEdge installers only). |
| PVsyst | Industry-standard PV simulation software used for detailed yield analysis and system performance modelling. More suited to commercial and engineering teams than small domestic installers. | CHF 700/year (~£620/year). |
| EasyPV | UK-built design tool for domestic solar PV and battery storage. MCS-compliant calculations and documentation. Integrates with Payaca. | Contact for pricing. |
| Provider | What They Offer | Pricing |
|---|---|---|
| Jobber | Field service management for home service businesses. Scheduling, quoting, invoicing, online booking, and customer communication. Used by some installers but has no renewable-specific features, no MCS compliance, and no design integration. | From $29/month (Core) to $149/month (Grow). Team plans up to $529/month. |
| SimPRO | Job management platform for trade businesses. Estimating, project management, invoicing, and inventory. Configurable but not built for renewable energy compliance. Implementation costs additional. | Custom pricing. Estimated from $149/month for 1 user. Implementation £2,000 to £8,000+. |
| Commusoft | Field service software for UK trades. Job management, scheduling, invoicing, and customer communication. No MCS documentation, no design tools, no grant tracking. | Custom pricing. Estimated from £60/user/month. Minimum 4 licences. |
The pattern is clear. Dedicated renewable tools handle design and proposals well but are often weak on project management and compliance documentation. Generic field service tools handle scheduling and invoicing but know nothing about MCS, BUS grants, or DNO applications. Most installers end up running two or three tools alongside spreadsheets and a shared drive full of photos.
Every renewable energy installer operates differently. A two-person solar-only outfit doing 10 domestic installations a month has completely different needs from a 30-person company installing solar, heat pumps, batteries, and EV chargers across three counties. A heat pump specialist dealing with BUS grant applications and MCS heat loss calculations works nothing like an EV charger installer focused on OZEV compliance and electrical certification.
Off-the-shelf tools are designed for the middle of the market. If your business sits in the middle, they work adequately. Most do not.
What typically happens: you adopt a platform, discover it does not handle one of your technologies properly, build workarounds in spreadsheets, and end up running the software alongside the manual processes it was supposed to replace. The site survey photos live in a shared Google Drive. The BUS grant applications are tracked in a spreadsheet. The handover packs are assembled manually in Word. The design tool does not talk to the CRM, so someone re-enters data.
The other problem is multi-technology support. An installer certified for solar PV, heat pumps, and battery storage needs different workflows, different compliance documentation, and different design approaches for each technology. Most platforms were built for solar and have bolted on heat pump features as an afterthought. EV charger installation workflows are rarely supported at all.
Then there is the data ownership question. Your MCS compliance records, commissioning certificates, and customer installation data need to be accessible for the lifetime of the warranty, which can be 10 to 25 years. If Payaca changes its pricing model, gets acquired, or shuts down, your access to that documentation is at risk. You cannot hand a customer their warranty documentation if the platform holding it no longer exists.
A bespoke system starts with your business. Not a product demo. Not a feature list. Your actual workflow, from the first lead through to the 10-year warranty check. We map exactly how your installation company operates and build a system that matches it precisely.
The result is software where every screen, every form, and every report reflects how your team actually works, across every technology you install.
Every system starts with your specific requirements. Here are examples of what your system could include:
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ESRE builds installer management systems for a one-off cost. No monthly subscription. No per-user fees. No price increases. You pay once and you own the system.
The typical installer does not use a single platform. A mid-sized company installing solar and heat pumps commonly pays for multiple tools:
| System | Typical Monthly Cost | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| CRM and project management | £250 to £1,200 | Payaca (£299-£1,199), Jobber ($29-$149), SimPRO (custom) |
| Design tools | £0 to £55 | OpenSolar (free), EasySolar (from $25/user), PVsyst (~£52/month) |
| Accounting | £25 to £45 | Xero, QuickBooks, Sage |
| Communication and marketing | £20 to £60 | Mailchimp, SMS services |
| Total monthly cost | £300 to £1,360 | |
| Five-year total | £18,000 to £81,600 |
On top of these costs, most installers still run spreadsheets for grant tracking, shared drives for site photos, and manual document assembly for handover packs. The "integrated" renewable installer is actually four or five systems and three manual processes held together by memory.
| System Scope | Typical One-Off Cost | Replaces |
|---|---|---|
| Core: lead management, quoting, project tracking, MCS documentation, handover packs, warranty register | £8,000 to £18,000 | CRM subscription + spreadsheets + manual document assembly |
| Full: above plus design tool integrations, BUS grant management, customer portal, multi-technology workflows | £18,000 to £35,000 | CRM + design tools + accounting workarounds + grant tracking |
| Multi-branch: full system across 2 to 5 offices with regional scheduling and central reporting | £30,000 to £60,000 | Per-branch subscriptions multiplied across locations |
An installer paying £500 per month across its tools spends £30,000 over five years and owns nothing. A bespoke system at £20,000 pays for itself in under four years, replaces every subscription and the spreadsheets, and belongs to the installer permanently.
Every system we build, the client owns all the code. There is no vendor lock-in. No proprietary platform you depend on. No API that gets deprecated when a vendor decides to change direction.
Your customer data, installation records, MCS compliance documents, and warranty information live on infrastructure you control. If you want to switch hosting providers, you can. If you want to add a new technology workflow, you can. If ESRE disappeared tomorrow, your software would keep running.
What we build is not one screen. It is a connected data architecture from which multiple applications emerge. Customer and property data is entered once and appears wherever it is needed.
All of these surfaces draw from the same data. A survey completed in the field is immediately visible in the office and feeds directly into the quote engine. A completed installation triggers the commissioning documentation workflow and the warranty registration process.
We train you and your team to evolve the system using AI. Since December 2025, AI tools have reached the maturity to work reliably alongside people for maintaining and extending systems. We set up your AI to understand your specific codebase, with failsafe environments, version control, and automated backups.
Because the data architecture already exists, adding new functionality is straightforward. Want to add EV charger installation workflows to a system originally built for solar? The customer, property, and scheduling data already exists. Need a subcontractor portal that was not in the original build? It slots into the same system. The initial build creates the foundation. Everything after that is incremental, and much of it can be done in-house with the tools we provide.
See examples of what we build across different sectors.
Payaca, Jobber, and SimPRO all charge monthly subscriptions. A bespoke system for your installation business, owned outright, no renewals.
Every installation record, commissioning certificate, performance estimate, and photo linked to the correct project. Ready for MCS inspection at any time.
Customer record, property details, survey data, design specifications, installation records, compliance documents, and warranty status. No jumping between four systems.
New MCS standards, new grant schemes, new technologies. When the regulatory landscape shifts, your system shifts with it. No waiting for a vendor's roadmap.
Switching systems is the part most installers dread. Years of customer records, installation data, compliance documents, and warranty registrations sitting in a platform you are trying to leave. The subscription vendors know this. It is one of the reasons lock-in works so well.
We handle data migration as a standard part of every build. We extract your existing data from whatever system you are currently using, clean it, restructure it, and import it into your new system. Customer records, property details, installation history, compliance documents, warranty registrations. Nothing gets left behind.
If your current provider makes export difficult, we work around it. We have migrated data from spreadsheets, legacy databases, shared drives full of unstructured files, and proprietary platforms that were never designed to let data out. The goal is always a clean transition with zero data loss. For a renewable energy installer, this is especially important because your MCS compliance records need to remain accessible and audit-ready after the migration.
A core system covering lead management, quoting, project tracking, MCS documentation, and handover packs typically takes eight to twelve weeks. More complex systems with design tool integrations, BUS grant tracking, multi-technology support, and customer portals take twelve to sixteen weeks.
Yes. Your system can generate every document MCS requires: performance estimates, commissioning certificates, handover packs with photo evidence, and the MCS certificate itself within the 10-day window. It can also maintain the Quality Management System records that MCS auditors check during inspections.
Yes. We can build connections to solar design platforms so that system specifications, performance data, and component details flow directly into your project records and quotes without manual re-entry. As of April 2026, OpenSolar charges for API access, but the integration eliminates the data duplication that currently costs your team time on every job.
Yes. For heat pump installations, the system can track BUS voucher applications (up to £7,500 per installation), approval status, and payment receipts. For solar, it can manage SEG registration and track the 0% VAT status of each domestic installation. Grant management becomes part of the project workflow rather than a separate spreadsheet.
We are always available for support, changes, and enhancements. But because you own the code and we train your AI to understand it, you are not dependent on us for day-to-day changes. When MCS standards change or new grant schemes launch, your system can be updated to match.
Your system is cloud-hosted on secure UK-based servers. Your data belongs to you. Every change is recorded in real time to a write-ahead log (WAL), so nothing is ever lost. You can also back up locally on a schedule for additional peace of mind. For MCS compliance, this means your installation records are protected and accessible for the full warranty period.
No. We design every system for the people who will actually use it. If your office manager books surveys, your installers capture commissioning data on-site, and your MD reviews the pipeline dashboard, the system works for all three without training manuals. We provide hands-on training as part of every build.