How can solar and battery installers get photos, paperwork and handover packs off site without chaos?

What paperwork does a solar or battery job actually produce?

More than most people outside the trade realise, and much of it has a deadline. The exact list depends on the system, your certification body and the DNO, but a domestic solar and battery job typically produces this.

In Scotland, the DNO is SP Energy Networks in central and southern Scotland and SSEN in the north. The G98 route has its own trap: under the National Grid guidance, it doesn't apply if you've commissioned other generation nearby in the 28 days before or plan more in the 28 days after, so busy installers on housing developments need to watch for the multiple-premises route.

Why does it go wrong?

The problem is rarely the paperwork itself. It's where it ends up. Photos sit in personal camera rolls and WhatsApp groups. The office rebuilds each handover pack by hand, chasing engineers for serial numbers a fortnight later. Nobody sees which jobs are near the MCS 10-day deadline until one is missed.

It also becomes a data protection problem. Photos of a customer's house, meter and consumer unit, tied to an address, are personal data. When they sit on personal phones, you can't control them, back them up or delete them when you should.

How should you organise jobs in SharePoint?

The principle is one job, one place, one number. A simple structure that works for most installers:

• One SharePoint site for operations, with a document library for jobs. Each job gets a folder (or a document set) named with its job number and postcode, created from a template with the same subfolders every time: survey, design, DNO, install photos, commissioning, certificates, handover.
• A tracker list (Microsoft Lists) with one row per job: customer, address, system size, status, install date, commissioning date, DNO reference, MCS certificate number and handover date. Add calculated columns for the MCS and G98 deadlines, and views that show what's overdue.
• Metadata, not just folders. Columns for job number and document type mean you can find every G98 form from last March in seconds, and they let Power Automate (Microsoft's workflow tool) move or file documents automatically.
• Permissions by role. Engineers can add to live jobs; only the office can change certificates; subcontractors see only their jobs, and lose access when the job closes.

Keep it plain: a tracker with ten columns everyone fills in beats one with forty that nobody trusts. Our guide chapter on Microsoft 365 for renewable energy companies covers project workspaces and partner sharing more generally.

How do engineers capture evidence on site?

Start with a photo checklist per stage, so every engineer takes the same shots: roof before work, each fixing point, cable routes, the inverter and battery with visible labels and serial numbers, isolators, the meter reading and the finished array. Name photos with the job number, or better, capture them straight into the job.

The tools range from simple to built-for-purpose:

• Phone camera plus the SharePoint or OneDrive app. The cheapest start. Engineers upload into the job folder from a managed phone. It relies on discipline and signal.
• A mobile form. Microsoft Forms or a Lists form can capture a checklist, readings and photos against a job number. Good for consistency, but plan on needing a connection to submit.
• A Power Apps app. A custom app can pull the job list, capture photos, readings and signatures, and save them straight into SharePoint or Dataverse (Microsoft's business database). Worth it once you're doing hundreds of jobs a year.
• A specialist installer platform. Several field service and solar CRM products do this out of the box. Check they export cleanly to your own storage, so the records are yours.

Whatever you choose, the device matters. Company phones enrolled in Microsoft Intune keep job data inside managed apps, can be wiped if lost, and stop photos ending up in personal cloud accounts. The guide chapter on mobile technology for renewables field teams covers devices and networks.

What if there's no signal on site?

Plenty of rural roofs in Scotland have none worth using. Plan for it rather than hoping.

Microsoft's own guidance is specific here. Power Apps canvas apps can work fully offline in the Power Apps mobile app when they're built on Dataverse: data is stored on the phone and synced automatically when the connection returns. Apps built on SharePoint lists have only basic offline storage, and any Power Apps app opened in a web browser can't run offline at all. Dataverse can add licensing cost, so price it before you build.

For simpler setups, the rule is "capture offline, sync daily": photos go into the job folder as soon as the engineer is back in signal, and never later than the end of the day.

How do you build the handover pack?

If the job folder is complete, the handover pack is an assembly job, not a hunt. Keep a Word template with the customer's details, system summary, safety information, maintenance guidance, warranty details, and an index of the certificates attached. Pull the details from the tracker row, attach the certificates from the job folder, save as a PDF into the handover subfolder, and send it to the customer with a copy they can keep. Power Automate can do most of the assembly once the process is steady.

Record the date the pack was sent in the tracker, so the office can resend it in a minute when a customer calls years later about a warranty claim.

How long should you keep job records?

There's no single answer, so decide it on purpose. Warranty, workmanship and liability claims can arrive many years after an install, so installers usually keep core records for a long time. UK GDPR's storage limitation principle says personal data shouldn't be kept longer than you need it, so set a period for each record type, write down why, and agree it with your insurer and adviser. Check too whether your certification body sets its own minimum period.

Microsoft 365 Business Premium lets you create retention policies for SharePoint sites and publish retention labels that people apply to documents. Auto-applying labels, or setting a default label on a library, needs an enterprise-level licence such as Microsoft 365 E5.

In practice: Greenversity. Greenversity's cyber insurer required stronger controls over the devices its teams use, and we met that requirement by rolling out Microsoft Intune across its laptops, tablets and phones. Indigo Unified Communications also built a SharePoint system to track the deployment of solar panels from job to job. It's now the standard approach across hundreds of Greenversity jobs. IT support for renewable energy →

What to do next

1. Write down every record a job produces, who creates it and its deadline, using the table above as a starting point.
2. Set up a job folder template and a tracker list in SharePoint, with deadline columns for MCS registration and DNO notification.
3. Give engineers a stage-by-stage photo checklist and a rule for uploading on the same day.
4. Move job photos off personal phones onto Intune-managed company devices.
5. Talk to us about building the structure, or a Power Apps capture app if you're at hundreds of jobs a year.