Scratchpad or Dooly for a Commercial Solar EPC's Pipeline

Pull a handful of recently closed deals and count how many times the system design or proposal changed between first contact and signed contract. Most commercial EPC deals see at least two or three real revisions, often driven by an updated site survey, a change in available incentives, or a financing partner's requirements. That number tells you how much version control your pipeline actually needs, which is a bigger issue here than it is in a faster-moving sale.

This happens more often than EPC teams like to admit: a customer receives a proposal reflecting an earlier system size or price because whoever sent it was not aware engineering had already revised the design. That is a data-hygiene failure, not a communication failure, and it usually means the CRM record was not updated when the internal revision happened.

A weekly bulk review across all open EPC opportunities, checking each one's design revision number and proposal date against the latest internal engineering update, catches stale records before they turn into an embarrassing customer-facing mistake. Scratchpad's grid view makes that cross-deal check realistic even when a sales or project development team is only tracking a dozen or so active opportunities, since each one carries enough internal detail that opening records one at a time is slow.

A call with a property owner or their CFO about financing structure, whether the deal uses a power purchase agreement, a lease, or a direct purchase with tax credit transfer, produces detail that materially changes the proposal and is easy to lose if it only lives in someone's notes. Capturing that detail automatically as the call happens keeps the financing structure accurate in the record instead of depending on someone's memory weeks later when the proposal gets finalized.

If stale proposals going out to customers is the pattern, the fix is closer to Scratchpad's bulk-review strength. If financing and incentive detail getting lost between the call and the final proposal is the pattern, the fix is closer to Dooly's call-capture strength. Given how long these deals run, most EPC teams eventually need both, but starting with whichever failure is currently costing signed contracts is the more useful first step.

Work through these checks to decide based on the failure you actually have:

1. Count how many times recent deals were revised before signing, and where each revision was recorded.
2. Look for cases where an outdated proposal went to a customer, and identify which handoff failed.
3. Check whether financing structure, such as a power purchase agreement, lease or direct purchase, is captured on the deal record.
4. Track interconnection status as its own field, separate from sales stage, so a utility delay isn't mistaken for a stalled customer.

Utility interconnection approval timelines are often outside the contractor's control and can stall an otherwise ready deal for months. Flag a deal's interconnection status separately from its sales stage, so a deal that is commercially ready but stuck waiting on the utility does not get treated the same as one that is genuinely stalled on the customer's side. Confusing the two leads a sales team to chase a customer who is not actually the bottleneck, which wastes effort and can strain a relationship that was never the problem.

On a deal this long, the person who sold the customer and the person finalizing engineering drawings are often not the same person, and a handoff without a clear version marker on the deal record is where mismatches creep in. Require every revised proposal to carry a version number visible on the CRM record, and require sales to confirm that number before sending anything to a customer. It is a small habit, but on a deal cycle this long, it is the difference between a customer who trusts the number they were quoted and one who has learned to expect it to change again.

A financing partner can revise its terms after an initial quote, particularly on deals that take months to reach signature, and that revision needs to reach the proposal before it reaches the customer, not after. Treat a financing term change the same as a design revision: a version bump on the record, with sales required to confirm the current number before any conversation with the customer continues. Skipping this step is how a contractor ends up explaining an unwelcome, avoidable surprise on a proposal a customer had already mentally agreed to.