Heat pump business software: site surveys, subsidy admin and maintenance contracts

Why is the heat pump journey so heavy on admin?

Selling a heat pump is one thing; keeping track of everything around it is the real work. Between the first enquiry and a running installation sit a site survey with a heat loss calculation and photos, a quote, a schedule with the right technicians, the installation itself and the handover. And then it really starts: the customer wants documents for their ISDE subsidy application (the Dutch subsidy scheme for heat pumps), and the maintenance contract needs a new appointment every year.

Every step produces paperwork that has to resurface later. The heat loss calculation backs the quote. The survey photos decide what the technician brings. The customer needs your invoice and the installation certificate for the subsidy. And since work on installations with certain refrigerants requires F-gas certified staff, you must be able to show who may do what.

In practice all of that lives in different places: photos in a group chat, the calculation on the surveyor's laptop, invoices in the accounting package and the maintenance schedule in an Excel list. While the company is small, that just about works. From a few installations a week onward, it becomes the biggest source of searching and mistakes.

How do you capture the site survey in a digital form?

The site survey is where you collect the most information in one go: the current installation, the placement indoors and outdoors, the meter cupboard, the heat emission system and the insulation. A paper form or a loose notepad means someone retypes it afterwards, and something is always missing.

A digital survey form fixes that with structure. Fixed fields for the data you always need, required photos of the placement and the meter cupboard, and conditional questions that only appear when they are relevant: questions about underfloor heating have no place in a home without it. Split the form into steps and the surveyor simply walks their route.

The heat loss calculation itself is usually made in dedicated calculation software. Your CRM does not need to perform that calculation; the result and the report just have to end up in the record, next to the survey form and the photos. Whoever writes the quote no longer has to chase anything down.

How do you help customers with the ISDE paperwork?

In the Netherlands, private homeowners usually apply for the ISDE subsidy themselves, after the installation. Yet most of the admin lands on you: the customer needs documents that come from your company, and every missing piece turns into another email or call.

Exactly which documents are required changes along with the scheme; the current overview lives at RVO, the Dutch government agency that runs it. The administrative pattern, however, is stable: the customer has to show what was installed, by whom, when and for what amount. That means your invoice, the installation certificate and the details of the installed device have to be findable the moment the customer asks.

Work with one record per customer, as in stipt, and that package stops being a search job: the quote, the handover form, the products and the invoice details already sit on the same record, and you add attachments to your email straight from the record. The difference between a few clicks and a hunt through old emails is not in the subsidy, but in where your documents live.

How do you run maintenance contracts without an Excel list?

A maintenance contract is the most predictable revenue a heat pump business has, and at the same time the easiest thing to let slip. A yearly service visit nobody schedules quietly becomes a contract you are not honouring.

The fix is to record the contract on the customer's record and not leave the next date in your head. In stipt you add a date field of your own to the record, for example 'Next service visit', and build a list in Lists that shows which records have that date next month. You share that list with colleagues or export it to Excel. When a customer shows up in it, you schedule the visit yourself or send a booking link so the customer picks a slot. After every visit you move the date on by a year. The technician doing the visit sees the full record: which device is installed, what the previous visit found and which work orders already exist.

Certification belongs in this same list. Work on installations with certain refrigerants may only be done by staff with F-gas certification. Good software lets you record per technician what they may and can do, F-gas certification as a skill for example, so scheduling takes it into account and nobody without the right papers ends up on a job by accident.

That way maintenance stops being an administrative debt and becomes a fixed rhythm: the contract is recorded, the list shows who is due and the record grows with every visit.