August's headline is Design Options: publish two, three or four complete proposals for the same site and send your customer one link, where they compare the options side by side, tick the extras they want and sign — remotely, in their own time, with no rep in the room. Alongside it ships round one of the built-in CRM: a rebuilt calendar, a drag-and-drop pipeline board and two-way Google & Outlook calendar sync. Here's everything, grouped by area, with what each change means for you.
Design Options — let the customer choose
- Two to four proposals, one link — every option is a complete Solar Proof project with its own design, its own products, its own pricing and its own published proposal. Group them, name them the way you sell ("Value", "Premium", "Solar only"), badge your recommendation, and send a single chooser link. Real choice for the customer, with a real proposal behind every card.
- Create an option in two clicks — a "Create another option" button sits on the publish preview screen the moment you've published, or tick "This is an option" in the Copy Project dialog; the copy joins the group and opens ready to tweak. A premium alternative in the time it takes to swap the battery.
- Different designs, not just different gear — options can carry entirely different roof layouts, so a 6.6 kW string design and a 10 kW battery-ready layout can sit in the same choice. Sell the upgrade path, not just a product swap.
- Side-by-side verification — the Options view lines up every member's kW, panel count, battery, price, STCs, year-one saving, payback and repayment, with the project and its PDF one click away — and "Preview what the customer sees" opens the chooser exactly as they'll receive it. Check the whole set before it leaves the building.
- The customer compares, ticks extras and signs — each card shows that option's actual roof layout, its headline figures and a link to the full proposal PDF; the customer ticks any optional extras and signs the option they want, with an Order Summary of extras and totals appended to the signed proposal. Deals close in the customer's evening, not your third meeting.
- One signature per job, guaranteed — the moment one option is signed, every sibling's signing link is cancelled and the siblings are archived with a note naming the winner, which becomes the main project. No stale links, no second contract, no confusion about which deal is live.
- Know the moment they look — opening the chooser is tracked like a proposal view: it lands in your activity feed, emails the rep (throttled to once per project per day) and moves the pipeline to follow-up. Call while they're still comparing.
- One row in your list, one job on your bill — the projects list shows a group as a single row with an "N options" chip that expands inline (search finds any member but returns the deal once), and billing treats the group as one job: up to three options included, with kW quotas and size tiers counting the group once at its largest member. Options don't clutter the list or burn your credits.
- Warnings you can trust — a template-drift check speaks up only when options' proposal templates genuinely differ in structure, and says how — with one click to apply the main option's template to all — and the "changed since published" flag is now a fingerprint of the things that decide what the customer's document says (the system, the money, the terms), so a nickname edit or a plain re-save no longer cries wolf. When Solar Proof warns you, it means it.
Your CRM, built in — round one
- A calendar that behaves like a calendar — rebuilt day, week and month views with drag to move, resize to reschedule, and stable per-user colours across your team. Scheduling that keeps up with the way you actually work.
- Drag-and-drop pipeline board — every deal laid out by stage, moved along with a drag, using the stages you've already configured; your Zapier status triggers keep firing. See and steer the funnel at a glance.
- Deals attach themselves — saving a project joins it to the contact's open opportunity (or starts one), so the board carries the value, system size and quote link the moment you hit save. Because the CRM shares one database with your quoting, there's no sync and no double entry — ever.
- Two-way Google & Outlook calendar sync — site visits booked in Solar Proof land in your phone's calendar, and appointments made elsewhere show up in Solar Proof. One diary, wherever you book it.
- Tasks, modernised — tasks link to the customer and the project they belong to and sit beside the calendar and board. The follow-up lives next to the deal it's for.
Solar Proof Apex
- Interval data intake — upload the customer's meter data (NEM12 or interval CSV) and Apex builds their real hourly consumption profile and optimises against it, instead of an estimated load shape. Sizing evidence straight from their actual meter.
Proposals & publishing
- Published links for the whole team — opening a colleague's published project now finds its Published badge and proposal link no matter who published it, including older projects filed under the publisher's account. The office always sees what the customer sees.
- Signing pathway hardened — every endpoint on the signing path now enforces sign-in and project ownership end to end. Your signing links stay yours.
Around the app
- Bill health checker — processed power bills get a health check that catches malformed data before it reaches the quote. Bad bills get caught, not quoted.
- Template builder upgrades — faster editing, cleaner template thumbnails and a round of stability fixes. Less friction in keeping your proposals on-brand.
- Accessories improvements — better handling of accessories on quotes. The extras price correctly, every time.
- SLD editor fixes — a round of fixes to the single-line diagram editor. Cleaner compliance drawings with less fiddling.
- Faster solar data — solar irradiance data is now cached, so new projects load their production estimates quicker. Less waiting at the start of every design.
- Copying and lookups — project copying is more reliable and address lookup bugs are fixed. The small stuff, working the way it should.
