Reporting for Solar Installers: The Numbers That Decide Which Roofs Get Visited

Solar sales is a survey business pretending to be a quotation business. The roof decides the system size, the shading decides the yield, and the structure decides the cost. Everything a sales report can usefully tell you is arranged around how fast enquiries reach a survey and how fast surveys turn into a number the customer can compare.

Enquiry to site survey

The share of enquiries that reach a physical survey, split by source and by area. It decides where campaign money goes and how survey slots are allocated. A bad number is a channel delivering plenty of enquiries and almost no surveys, which is either a lead quality problem or a first response problem. Check response time before cutting the spend, because the two look identical in a summary chart.

Survey to costed proposal turnaround

Hours between the survey being completed and the proposal reaching the customer, shown as a median and a ninetieth percentile. It decides whether you need a second person doing costings. A bad number is a reasonable median with a long tail, which means one bottleneck rather than a systemic delay, and is usually the cheapest fault in the whole funnel to repair.

Pipeline in kilowatts by expected month

Live opportunities expressed as capacity, segmented into residential, housing society and commercial. It decides procurement and crew planning. A bad number is a pipeline that looks healthy in rupees while being carried by one commercial deal whose approval process has not started. Capacity by segment makes that obvious in a way a value total never will.

Stage ageing, including the waiting bucket

Days since the last genuine contact on every live deal, with financing and application outcomes held in their own stage. It decides this week's call list. A bad number is a large parked bucket that never returns to active, which means the pipeline is being padded by deals nobody has to declare lost.

Loss reasons and realised rate per watt

Why deals ended, from a closed list, read alongside the average realised rate per watt by executive. It decides pricing policy and where discount authority sits. A bad number is a falling realised rate with price recorded as the reason for most losses, because that is how a team talks itself into a lower rate card without ever testing whether the losses were about price at all.

Enquiry to survey conversion. It is derived from timestamps, so it is trustworthy immediately, and it sits at the widest point of the funnel where a small percentage improvement is worth more than a large improvement anywhere downstream. Build kW pipeline second, because it is the report your operations and procurement colleagues will actually ask for, and reports that other departments want tend to survive.

A solar report that does not change a decision is a screenshot. These are the decisions each one is supposed to force.

System size in kW recorded on every opportunity, not only on won deals. One owner per enquiry. A fixed source list that distinguishes dealer referral from customer referral. Surveys logged as dated events with an outcome, including the ones that found an unsuitable roof. Financing and application status held in a real stage. Loss reasons from a closed list. Duplicates merged, because a customer who enquired through two channels in one week will otherwise appear as two opportunities and flatter your conversion twice.

Enquiries by month, calls made per executive, and a map of leads by pin code turn up in almost every solar CRM and change nothing. Enquiry volume is a marketing number you already know. Call counts without survey counts beside them reward dialling. Pin code maps are interesting exactly once unless you route or price by area. The test is blunt and worth applying to every chart in your account: name the decision it changes, or switch it off.

It does not handle commissioning documentation, utility paperwork, inventory or your accounts. Those belong in the systems built for them. What it gives you is an honest picture of the commercial funnel from enquiry through survey, proposal, order and the reasons behind everything that did not close.

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