If you sell solar in Australia, you have probably had the email by now. SunWiz, the company behind PVsell, has become OpenSolar’s exclusive Australian sales training partner and is actively moving its user base across, with an optional migration path published for existing customers (PVsell, n.d.; SunWiz, n.d.).
Here is the part I want to say plainly before anything else: OpenSolar deserves the recommendation. It is free, it is genuinely well-built for solar design and proposals, and it has a large and growing installer base in this country (OpenSolar, n.d.). If you are moving to it for design and quoting, you are moving to a good tool.
What it is not is a CRM. And it does not lodge your STCs.
That distinction sounds like splitting hairs until you are three weeks past an install, sitting on a pile of half-finished paperwork, wondering why the cash has not landed. So let me walk through exactly what the design tool was never built to do, why PVsell users feel it first, and what you actually need sitting alongside it.
What OpenSolar actually is, and what it is not
OpenSolar is a design and proposal platform. You drop a system on a roof, model the production, build a slick proposal, and send it. For that job, it is excellent, and the price is hard to argue with.
The confusion comes from the word “CRM”. OpenSolar does have a contact list, pipeline stages, and team assignments. On a feature checklist that reads like a CRM. In practice it is a lightweight layer bolted onto a design tool, and it stops well short of how an install business actually runs day to day.
A real CRM for a solar business is not a list of names with a status next to each one. It is the system that chases the documentation after the job is done, tells you which lead source paid for itself, and shows you where the money is stuck. None of that is what OpenSolar was built to do, and that is fine. The mistake is assuming the design tool is also the business management tool.
Why PVsell users are the most exposed
Every installer migrating to OpenSolar hits this gap, but PVsell users hit it harder, because PVsell quietly covered two things OpenSolar’s free tier does not.
First, PVsell had STC value built into its financial modelling. When you built a quote, the certificate value was part of the number. That is gone in the design-tool view; you are now tracking certificate value somewhere else, or not tracking it at all.
Second, PVsell had a basic pipeline view that many operators leaned on as their de facto job tracker. OpenSolar handles the design side well enough, but migrating your design workflow is not the same as migrating your business operations. Quoting became smoother. Running the business stayed just as hard (Payaca, n.d.).
So the migration is a clean win on design and a quiet step backwards on operations, unless you go in knowing that and plan for the second half.
STC lodgement is where the money actually gets stuck
Let me be precise about STCs, because the whole industry keeps calling them the wrong thing. Small-scale Technology Certificates are not a government rebate. They are tradeable certificates, created from an eligible system’s deemed generation under the federal Renewable Energy Target, that liable entities have to buy and surrender to the Clean Energy Regulator to meet their obligations (Clean Energy Regulator, n.d.). The customer assigns their right to create those certificates to you in exchange for an up-front discount, which is why it feels like a rebate to the buyer but is not one.
That mechanism matters to your cashflow for one reason: you do not get paid until the paperwork is right and the certificates are created and sold. To create them, you need the system installed by an accredited installer, the owner’s signed assignment, grid connection confirmation, and the compliance documentation and photos, all collected and lodged through a registered agent (Solar Accreditation Australia, n.d.; Clean Energy Regulator, n.d.).
Every day that paperwork sits incomplete is a day the certificate value is locked up. For a one-job-a-month operator that is an annoyance. For a business running several installs a week, it is a receivables problem with your name on it, and OpenSolar has no view of it because lodgement was never its job.
The batch lodgement trap
Here is the failure mode I have watched play out more times than I can count, across hundreds of businesses over twenty years in this trade.
The install gets done. The certificate paperwork is “nearly there”. You are flat out, so you let it stack up and lodge in batches, because lodging twenty at once feels more efficient than lodging them one at a time. It is more efficient, for the ten minutes you spend lodging.
The cost is hidden in the weeks in between. A job finished in week one does not settle until you finally lodge the batch in week five or six, and the price of an STC floats with the market the entire time you are sitting on it (Clean Energy Regulator, n.d.). You have effectively given the customer their discount up front and then financed the certificate value yourself for over a month.
The single biggest lever on lodgement speed is not lodging faster. It is capturing the documentation at the time of install, on site, so there is nothing to chase afterwards. A workflow that collects the signature, the photos, and the connection detail while the team is still on the roof turns a six-week receivables gap into a same-week one. A design tool does not do that, because the design is finished before the install even happens.
Lead source visibility disappears at the design tool
The other thing that quietly vanishes is where your jobs are coming from.
If you pay for leads, you need to know which sources convert. Solarquotes is the dominant paid lead source in this market, and platforms like Solar Choice sit alongside it, but neither feeds natively into OpenSolar. The lead lands, you build a design, and the origin of that lead disappears into a general “new enquiry” bucket.
That is money flying blind. You cannot tell which channel is earning its keep and which one is quietly burning your marketing budget, because the data that would tell you was never captured. Lead source belongs in a CRM, and without one it is gone by the time you have built the proposal.
This is the same discipline I bang on about with supplier relationships: if you cannot see the number, you cannot manage the cost. Lead source visibility is exactly that problem wearing a different hat.
OpenSolar is not the problem
I want to be fair to the tool, because the temptation after reading all that is to blame OpenSolar. Do not. It is doing precisely what it was built to do, and doing it well.
The problem is the assumption underneath the migration: that a design tool is also a business management tool. The installers who get the most out of OpenSolar are the ones who treat it as one excellent layer of their stack, the design and proposal layer, and pair it with something built for the operational side: ingesting leads from the AU sources you actually use, capturing install documentation in a single workflow, tracking STC lodgement status per job, and keeping the cashflow position visible without you living in a spreadsheet.
That operational layer is the gap I am building CurrentFlow to fill, because it is the exact gap I kept watching installers fall into. It is not built yet and there are no shortcuts I can sell you today. But if you have just moved to OpenSolar and you are looking at the half of your business the design tool does not cover, that is the problem I am building for, and you can join the waitlist to follow along.
In the meantime, the advice stands on its own even if the product never existed: keep using OpenSolar for what it is good at, capture your STC paperwork on the day rather than chasing it, lodge fast instead of in batches, and write down where every lead came from. Do those four things and you have closed most of the gap by hand.
References
Clean Energy Regulator. (n.d.). Small-scale technology certificates. Australian Government. https://www.cleanenergyregulator.gov.au/
OpenSolar. (n.d.). Solar design and proposal software. https://www.opensolar.com/
PVsell. (n.d.). PVsell to OpenSolar (optional) migration. https://www.pvsell.com.au/pvsell-to-opensolar-optional-migration/
Solar Accreditation Australia. (n.d.). Accreditation for solar installers and designers. https://solaraccreditation.com.au/
SunWiz. (n.d.). Solar industry sales training and analytics. https://www.sunwiz.com.au/
FAQ
Is OpenSolar a CRM?
Not in the way an install business needs. OpenSolar has a contact list, pipeline stages, and team assignments, but it is a design and proposal platform first. It does not chase post-install documentation, ingest leads from Australian lead sources, or track where your cash is stuck. Those are the jobs a proper CRM and compliance workflow do, and they sit outside what OpenSolar was built for.
Does OpenSolar lodge my STCs?
No. OpenSolar does not create or lodge Small-scale Technology Certificates. Lodgement still runs through a registered agent, and it depends on you collecting the signed assignment, the compliance paperwork, the grid connection confirmation, and the install photos, then getting them lodged with the Clean Energy Regulator’s process behind it. The design tool finishes its work before any of that happens.
Are STCs a government rebate?
No, and the distinction matters for how you treat the cash. STCs are tradeable certificates created from an eligible system’s deemed generation under the Renewable Energy Target, which liable entities must buy and surrender to the Clean Energy Regulator. The customer assigns the right to create them to you for an up-front discount, so it feels like a rebate to the buyer, but you are carrying a tradeable asset whose price moves with the market until you sell it.
What happens to my PVsell pipeline and STC calculations when I migrate?
The design and proposal workflow moves across cleanly, but the two operational features PVsell quietly gave you do not have a direct equivalent in OpenSolar’s free tier. PVsell modelled STC value inside its financial calculations and offered a basic pipeline view that many operators used as a job tracker. After migrating, you will need somewhere else to handle certificate value and operational tracking.
Do I have to stop using OpenSolar to fix the gap?
Not at all, and you should not. Keep OpenSolar as your design and proposal layer; it is good at that. The fix is to pair it with an operational layer that captures install documentation on the day, tracks STC lodgement status per job, records lead source, and keeps your cashflow position visible. The design tool and the operational tool are two different jobs, and the businesses that run well treat them that way.