A solar engineer inspects a panel in the field
Digital Transformation

Scale and Streamline with Solar Project Management Software

Written By: Elise Freedman
May 3, 2023
6 min read

Streamline installation with solar project management software

The solar industry continues to grow roughly 20% per year on average, creating enormous opportunities for your solar installation business. As your company and customer base expand, the right solar project management software can help deliver higher margins, happier customers, and a stronger sales pipeline.

When choosing solar project management software, you’ll see lots of options for solutions that can help with everything from managing leads and producing estimates to organizing tasks and tracking performance metrics. What’s harder to find, however, is a solution that lets you continually customize your project management solution to meet the unique and evolving needs of your business. That’s where Quickbase can help.

As a no-code application development platform, Quickbase offers solar project management software that can easily be modified and continuously improved by users who don’t have any previous coding skills or a background in software development. Quickbase’s modern, agile way of building business applications enables users to create powerful solutions for managing complex solar projects.

The challenges of solar project management

Solar project management software must be able to quickly and easily execute on a photovoltaic installation, including consideration for common challenges like:

  • Managing multiple projects of various sizes – from industrial rooftop projects and solar farms to residential rooftops.
  • Selecting an appropriate site for a solar farm, conducting site assessments, getting zoning approvals, and managing legal rights.
  • Managing costs to ensure an adequate return on investment for the client and sufficient profit margins for your business.
  • Ensuring that appropriate electric grid infrastructure is available.
  • Managing and tracking the permitting process.
  • Ordering, tracking, and ensuring timely delivery of supplies to enable on-time completion of projects.
  • Executing legal agreements with local authorities and neighboring properties.
  • Attracting, managing, and retaining employees amidst a skills shortage.
  • Facilitating communication between teams of design engineers, vendors, distributors, installation teams, and other stakeholders.
  • Tracking maintenance schedules and production warranties.
  • Managing subcontractors and enabling vendors, clients, and lenders to access the information they need quickly and easily.
  • Increasing efficiency to ensure healthy profit margins.

The right solar project management solution can streamline management of this myriad of details. But choosing the right solution can be a challenge in itself. You not only need an application that can be customized to your specific needs, but one that’s easy to deploy, simple to use, and integrates easily with your existing investments in a solar technology stack. Fortunately, Quickbase solar project management software ticks every one of these boxes.

Quickbase: customizable solar project management software

Quickbase is a no-code development platform that lets problem solvers with any level of technical expertise build and customize applications to tackle projects of limitless complexity. Our platform lets you easily create, connect, and customize enterprise applications to fix visibility and workflow gaps without replacing a single system.

As a solar project management software solution, Quickbase lets you:

  • Scale operations faster. Manage a growing portfolio of projects more efficiently, without needing to add staff to your project management team.
  • Centralize workflows. Manage your operations from one central platform where you can track leads, schedule site surveys, report on sales, and manage all the complexities of installation projects from a single pane of glass.
  • Give everyone the information they need. Create custom dashboards for each role, allowing users to view the information they need in real time based on their team. Integrate scattered spreadsheets with solutions your team can access anytime, anywhere, on any device.
  • Customize your solar project management software. Build applications that support your unique processes and workflows. Use no-code technology to empower all employees to build their own solutions without needing help from IT.
  • Improve efficiency. Streamline processes and eliminate manual errors through workflow automation. Integrate dealer, installer, and manufacturer systems together into a single solar project management software solution.
  • Build efficiency into your solar tech stack. Rely on dynamic, up-to-date reports to anticipate upcoming changes in legislation around renewable energy that may impact your profitability and compliance requirements.

More solutions from Quickbase

Along with solar project management software and project planning tools, the Quickbase platform provides tools for comprehensive disciplines, including:

  • Site selection & evaluation. Choose the best location with custom site selection applications.
  • Resource management. Balance workloads, reduce costs, and meet goals faster by viewing employee and vendor capacity across your project portfolio.
  • Work order management. Drive performance at every location with greater visibility into work orders across your portfolio.
  • Budget and financial management. Gain access to accurate financial information that lets you and your teams cut costs and maximize profits.
  • Subcontractor management. Automate processes and easily track contacts, vendor performance, certifications, and job quality.
  • Supply chain management. Fine-tune processes to reduce supply chain disruption and increase efficiency.
  • Process improvement. Continuously improve the processes at the core of your business with a flexible no-code platform.
  • Field services. Track client and project information from any location and on any device.
  • CRM and sales capabilities. Centralize and securely integrate customer data with your existing systems.
  • Training management. Create personalized training management software to access, maintain, and manage training data in one central location.
  • Real estate portfolio. Access and manage all property and real estate information in one place.
  • Real estate contract management. Manage all contracts from one location, including property agreements, leases, customer, and vendor contracts.

Why Quickbase?

Quickbase offers a modern approach to building custom software solutions – from workflow software and business process management software to industry-specific applications. Purpose-built for operational agility, Quickbase is designed to allow developers and non-developers alike to create bespoke solutions faster and with fewer resources.

With Quickbase, you can:

  • Use no-code and low-code development tools to quickly and easily build solutions for complex projects while avoiding the traditional cost of developing, deploying, and maintaining software.
  • Automate workflows by integrating custom applications with existing platforms and technology stacks.
  • Continuously deploy new applications, using sandbox capabilities to update apps, transform data, or change schema without taking applications off-line.
  • Get real-time, actionable insights to every employee who needs them with personalized dashboards.

FAQs

What is solar project management software?

Solar project management software enables solar installers to manage many aspects of solar projects more easily in order to increase efficiency, improve profit margins, and deliver projects on time and within budget. Solar project management software typically includes tools for facilitating communication between teams, customers and partners; automating processes to accelerate deployments; connecting information from siloed systems throughout the organization; and monitoring everything with custom reports and dashboards.

What are the challenges of managing solar projects?

Solar installation companies are frequently managing multiple projects of different sizes simultaneously. Keeping track of estimates, proposals, permits, supply chain, schedules, teams, budgets, and communications can be a highly complex and time-intensive endeavor. When not managed efficiently, these many tasks can create inefficiencies, slowdowns, and errors that can jeopardize customer satisfaction and profit margins.

Elise Freedman
Written By: Elise Freedman