Solar does not have a dispatch problem. It has a dwell problem.
Every tool marketed as solar scheduling and dispatch software is built on the assumption underneath field service software generally: that the hard part is getting the right person to the right address in the least driving time. That assumption is correct for plumbing. It is close to worthless in solar, where the crew is on the roof for one or two days inside a project that runs for months, and where the thing that kills the job is not a badly routed truck. It is the eleven days of silence after the site survey.
Here is the number that should reframe the entire purchase. In NREL technical report NREL/TP-6A20-80626, researchers analysed an installer provided dataset of 199,665 residential PV only projects, roughly 10 percent of U.S. installs per year from 2017 to 2019. On average, 51 percent of contracts in that dataset failed to install. The cost of those dead projects does not vanish. NREL estimated cancellations add about $0.20 per watt to system costs, roughly $1,400 per project, loaded onto the customers who do go through with it.
You are not buying a calendar. You are buying the thing that decides whether half your signed revenue survives the wait.
The short answer
Solar scheduling and dispatch software should be judged on how quickly a completed milestone turns into the next booked appointment, because the gaps between appointments are where projects are lost. Solar runs five distinct field events across a project that averages about 16 weeks: the site survey, the install, the AHJ inspection, any utility or meter appointment, and post PTO service. A tool that only gives you a drag and drop day view is solving the easiest of those five and ignoring the four that decide whether you get paid.
Sixteen weeks, and only two days of it involve a truck
NREL's survey of PV installers, published in Energy Policy volume 156 as NREL/JA-6A20-80685, found that PV adoptions take about 16 weeks on average from contract signature until system operation. The physical install is one to two days of that. Everything else is application, review, queue and wait.
That ratio is the whole argument. If roughly 78 of 80 working days in a project involve no crew and no truck, a scheduling tool optimised for crews and trucks is optimising two percent of the timeline. The other 98 percent is a state machine: who owes what to whom, and how long they have owed it. Break the typical residential sequence into its actual phases and the shape gets obvious:
| Phase | Owner | Typical duration | Is a crew involved? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Site survey and design | You | 1 to 2 weeks after close | Yes, one visit |
| Permit application filed | You | 1 to 3 days after design sign off | No |
| AHJ permit review | Local authority | 2 to 8 weeks | No |
| Equipment procurement | You and supplier | Parallel to permitting | No |
| Physical installation | Your crew | 1 to 2 days | Yes, the big one |
| AHJ inspection | Local authority | Days to weeks post install | Yes, someone must be there |
| Interconnection application | You | Filed before or at install | No |
| Utility review and PTO | Utility | 1 to 6 weeks, longer on engineering track | Sometimes a meter visit |
Two rows out of eight involve dispatch in any conventional sense. The rest is coordination against calendars that belong to other organisations.
By the numbers
NREL's SolarAPP+ Performance Review of 2023 data put the median full permitting cycle, from submission through passed inspection, at 47.5 days through traditional processes against 33 days in SolarAPP+ jurisdictions, a difference of 14.5 business days. That single variable can swing your contract to PTO time by three weeks depending only on which side of a municipal line the roof sits.
The five dates your system has to hold
Stop thinking of solar as one job with one date. It is five appointments, each with a different constraint, and a platform that cannot model all five will push at least one of them into a spreadsheet.
1. The site survey. The highest leverage field event you have. Everything downstream depends on what the surveyor captures: roof condition, rafter spacing, main service panel rating, meter location. Miss a needed panel upgrade here and it resurfaces during permit review as a cost increase the customer never agreed to, one of the most reliable cancellation triggers in residential solar. Book it within days of contract, and treat it as incomplete until the required fields are filled.
2. The install day. The only event the demo will show you, and genuinely the easiest of the five, because by the time you reach it every dependency has already resolved.
3. The AHJ inspection. Booked on the inspector's calendar, in a window you often cannot pick, sometimes requiring your electrician on site. This is the appointment most commonly dropped, because it falls after your crew has already declared the job finished.
4. The utility appointment. Not always required, but when the utility wants a meter swap or a witness test, you are scheduling a body against a third party's availability with no leverage.
5. The service call after PTO. A truck roll to tighten one panel is not a project, it is a service ticket, and the same system should hold both or you lose the history.
Watch out
A real failure mode, posted publicly by a homeowner in r/solar in 2026: the install crew finished an 8kW system with a Powerwall in about half a day, told the homeowner they had forgotten the grounding wire, and asked them to sign completion paperwork "in good faith." Nobody came back. Months later the homeowner called PG&E and the county directly and was told no inspection had ever been scheduled. Appointment two was marked complete. Appointments three and four never existed.
That is not a routing failure. No dispatch board would have caught it, because the job was closed. It is a state failure: the system had no concept of "installed but not inspected" with an owner and a clock on it.
What the cancellation data actually says
Two credible NREL numbers on cancellations look like they contradict each other, and understanding why they do not is worth more than either one alone.
The technical report on the 199,665 project dataset found that on average 51 percent of contracts failed to install. The Energy Policy survey paper reported that about 1 in 10 rooftop solar customers who sign a contract cancel before the system is installed.
They measure different things. The first counts every project in installer records that did not reach an install, which sweeps in disqualifications, financing failures, unbuildable roofs and projects abandoned in place. The second asks installers to self report their cancellation rate, a narrower and more flattering definition. If you are modelling operational risk, plan around the dataset figure, because a project killed by a failed credit check and one killed by a customer walking away cost you the same coordination hours.
The report also found something more useful than either headline: cancellations occur earlier in project timelines, though a significant number happen even after permit and approval to build were granted. Both ends matter. The early cluster means your first two weeks are the highest risk period you have. The late cluster means a permit in hand does not make a project safe.
By the numbers
Pale Blue Dawn co-founder Steven Male, quoted in Solar Power World in November 2024, put it more sharply from vendor data: "of all customers who cancel or stall, 73% do so in the first 5 days." Treat that as a vendor claim rather than a peer reviewed finding, but it points the same direction as NREL's timing result. The five days after signature deserve more operational attention than the five days before install.
The delay you can control, and the one you cannot
Here is the finding that should change what you buy. NREL's cancellation study concluded that cancellations do not appear to be driven by review delays in permitting and interconnection applications. And in the installer survey, while most respondents believed permitting, inspection and interconnection delays increase cancellations, the larger installers, the ones with enough volume to actually measure it, ranked changes in customer financial situations above those delays as the main cause.
This invalidates the most common software pitch in the category. Vendors sell "faster permitting" and "automated interconnection submissions." Those are worth having, but they are not where your cancellations come from, and buying primarily for them aims at the wrong target.
The delays you cannot control are the review clocks at the AHJ and the utility. The delays you can control are entirely internal:
- Days from contract signature to a booked site survey
- Days from site survey to a completed design
- Days from design sign off to permit submitted
- Days from permit approval to a booked install date
- Days from install to inspection requested
- Days from inspection passed to interconnection package submitted
Every one of those is a queue inside your own building. Add them up in your own data and most residential solar companies find more controllable dead time than AHJ review time. A homeowner posting in r/solar in December 2025 described signing in July, "in an area with minimal permitting requirements," and being told in the first week of December that the project could not be fit into that year's schedule at all. Minimal permitting, five months, no install date. That is a capacity and queueing failure with no external party to blame.
Another cancelled outright after discovering, by calling the county themselves, that their installer "submitted the permit incorrectly which they didn't disclose." The rework was survivable. The silence was not.
If your projects live across a proposal tool, a shared calendar and three spreadsheets, no amount of dispatch features will fix the gaps. We build custom CRM systems around the actual sequence a solar project moves through, including the states where you are waiting on someone else, so nothing sits without an owner and a due date.
What your board has to model that a calendar cannot
A dispatch calendar answers "who is working today." A solar project board has to answer "what is stuck, for how long, and whose fault is it." Those need different data structures.
At minimum, every project needs these fields live and queryable:
| Field | Why it exists |
|---|---|
| Current state | Not a stage name like "in progress." Something actionable: awaiting AHJ review, awaiting customer HOA letter, ready to schedule install. |
| Blocking party | You, the AHJ, the utility, the customer, the supplier. This is the single most valuable field on the board. |
| Days in current state | The clock that drives escalation. |
| Expected duration for this AHJ or utility | Your own historical average by jurisdiction, so "21 days" reads as normal or overdue. |
| Owner | A person, not a team. |
| Next scheduled appointment | If blank on a project past design, that is your daily exception list. |
| Last customer contact date | The metric that correlates with cancellation, and the one nobody tracks. |
The "blocking party" field is what separates a project board from a to do list. Filter to everything blocked on you and you have your team's real backlog. Filter to everything blocked on an external party past its expected window and you have your coordinator's morning call list. Filter to everything blocked on the customer and you have found the projects most likely to cancel, because a customer who has not returned an HOA form in three weeks has usually already decided.
Keep expected durations per AHJ and per utility rather than one global average. Telling every customer "four to eight weeks" when one city clears permits in ten days and another takes five is how you under promise on the fast ones and get caught lying on the slow ones.
The service side nobody scopes
Once PTO lands, the project ends and a service relationship begins, on genuinely different scheduling logic. Service calls are short, unscheduled, geographically scattered and margin sensitive. This is the one part of solar where classic dispatch thinking, routing and same day slotting, actually applies.
It is also where installers quietly lose money. A former industry insider posting an AMA in r/solar in November 2025 described the common pattern: the customer waits three to eight weeks for the manufacturer to ship a replacement part, then pays a fee to get a crew out, because the installer is leaning on the manufacturer warranty rather than carrying the labour.
Either way, service belongs in the same system as the install history, because the technician needs to know which inverter went on that roof, who installed it and what the as built looks like. Splitting service into a separate tool guarantees somebody drives out to a job blind.
Pricing, and the per seat trap
Pricing in this category is deliberately opaque. Several of the vendors that dominate the search results for solar scheduling software publish nothing and quote only after a demo call.
Where numbers do exist, Scoop Solar's own 2026 pricing guide is the most usable public benchmark: it puts typical U.S. field service management software at $50 to $100 per user per month, and notes some advanced plans exceed $350 per user per month. Solar specific and enterprise platforms sit at the upper end and usually add a one time implementation fee that is not in the sticker price.
Per seat pricing deserves more scrutiny in solar than in most trades, for a structural reason: a large share of solar headcount is not employed headcount. Sales is heavily 1099. Installation is frequently subcontracted, sometimes to partners who are themselves financially fragile, as the Freedom Forever bankruptcy demonstrated for every installer mid project with them. Per seat pricing bills you for peak season headcount you carry four months of the year, and it creates a direct financial incentive to leave subs and reps out of the system, which is precisely the data that makes the board accurate.
Tip
Before you compare feature lists, model the cost at your August headcount, not today's. Then model it again including every subcontracted crew lead and 1099 rep who would need to update a job status. If the second number makes you flinch, per seat is the wrong model for your business and no feature will compensate.
How to test a platform in one hour
Vendor demos are choreographed around the install day. Take control of the demo and run these instead. Each one takes minutes and each maps to a failure mode above.
- The handoff test. Ask them to mark a site survey complete and then show you how the design task gets created and assigned. If a human has to remember, the tool is a viewer, not a system.
- The blocked state test. Ask to see every project currently waiting on the utility, sorted by days waiting, with the ones past that utility's normal window flagged. If the answer involves exporting to a spreadsheet, walk.
- The silence test. Ask for a list of projects with no customer contact in 14 days. This is the single highest value report in solar operations and almost no dispatch tool has it.
- The unscheduled test. Ask for every project past design approval with no next appointment booked. That list is your revenue at risk.
- The reschedule test. Move an install date and watch what happens to the crew assignment, the equipment allocation, the customer notification and the inspection request. If only the calendar block moves, the rest is your coordinator's manual problem forever.
- The two roofs test. Enter two projects in different jurisdictions and ask the system to give each an expected permit date. If it gives the same answer for both, it does not know anything about your AHJs and never will.
- The service test. Create a warranty call on a system installed 18 months ago and see whether the technician's mobile view shows the original as built, the inverter model and the install crew.
A platform that passes one through four will do more for your cancellation rate than any amount of route optimisation. If you are still deciding between categories rather than products, we compared the two in CRM vs field service software for solar, and the shortlist itself is covered in the best CRM for solar companies.
The uncomfortable part
Software will not fix a process nobody follows. The most useful comment on the thread where a small solar company asked r/projectmanagement for help escaping their spreadsheets was not a product recommendation. It was this, from u/Not_a_throwaway_acnt: "A new system won't solve 10 people doing things 10 different ways."
That is the honest ceiling on this purchase. If your coordinators each track projects their own way, buying a platform digitises the inconsistency at $75 a seat. Define the states first, on paper, with the exit criteria for each one. Then buy the tool that can hold them. The order matters, and doing it backwards is the most common way solar companies end up paying for two systems and trusting neither.
The bottom line
Solar scheduling and dispatch software is misnamed. Dispatch is two days of a 16 week project, and it is the part that rarely goes wrong. What you actually need is a state machine that holds a project through the 14 weeks when nobody is driving anywhere, knows which of the five appointments comes next, names the party you are waiting on, and puts a clock on the wait.
NREL's data says roughly half of signed residential contracts never reach an install, and that the ones that do carry about $1,400 each of somebody else's dead project. It also says the permitting queue is not the reason. That leaves the part you control. Track your own contract to PTO time across the six internal handoffs listed above, fix the two longest, then buy the system that will not let them grow back.