The go-live checklist

Going live is something Solar Desk does with you, not a button in your dashboard. Before an operator can switch you on, three things have to be true.

They are not a formality. Each one is a specific way of failing in public: a price that is not yours, hardware you do not fit, or an enquiry that arrives and nobody is told. The activation button refuses while any of them is outstanding, and names the ones that are.

1. Pricing is no longer the platform placeholder

What it means. Your base installation, per kWp of system and scaffolding figures are still exactly the example numbers every new account ships with.

How to clear it. Change them on Pricing and save.

Why it is checked. A placeholder is not a market rate and it is not yours. An installation cost built on our guesses goes out under your name, gets compared against a real quote from a competitor, and costs you the job either way, whether it was too high or too low.

The check is narrower than the job

This looks at those three fields only. Change one of them and the check passes and the amber warning disappears, even if your electricity price, your generation figure and your self-consumption assumptions are all still ours.

Clearing the blocker is not the same as finishing the pricing sheet. Read the whole page.

2. At least one active panel in the catalogue

What it means. There is no panel in Products with Offered ticked. An empty catalogue counts, and so does a catalogue where every panel has been unticked.

How to clear it. Add a panel on Products and leave Offered ticked.

Why it is checked. New accounts ship with nothing on purpose, because seeding a stranger’s catalogue with someone else’s hardware is the one thing a white-label tool cannot do. The consequence is that this has to be checked rather than assumed. Without a panel, the calculator hides the picker entirely and your customer configures a system nobody has named.

Batteries and inverters are not checked. Batteries are worth adding anyway, since a battery is where a lot of the saving comes from. Inverters do not appear in the customer journey at all.

3. An address set to receive new leads

What it means. “Where new enquiries go” on Theme is empty.

How to clear it. Put in at least one address, one per line.

Why it is checked. This is the entire notification system. In the dashboard itself, the only signals are a small unread badge on a lead, a “wants a call” tag and the counts in the status breakdown. Everything else arrives by email.

And that email is sent once per unread run: four customer messages in a row produce a single email, and the counter resets only when somebody reads. There is no reminder, no daily digest and no scheduler, so a recipient who never opens their inbox gets exactly one email, ever. With no address at all, an enquiry lands in your pipeline and nobody anywhere is told.

Use an address a person genuinely watches. Add a second if the first belongs to someone who takes holidays.

What is not checked

Your colours, your tagline, your step labels, your callback window, your quote validity period, your batteries and your logo. None of them will stop you going live, and defaults will not either.

That is deliberate. The checklist catches the three things that produce a wrong number or a lost enquiry. Everything else is a matter of taste, and your taste is not ours to gate.

Can it be overridden?

Yes. An operator can override the checklist, behind a link and then a second, deliberately separate confirmation. It exists for the case where we already know your figures are right, usually because we sat down and entered them with you.

It is not a shortcut past the pricing job. If someone offers to take you live with placeholder pricing still in place, the numbers in front of your customers that afternoon are Solar Desk’s invented ones.

What happens when we switch you on

• Your calculator answers for the public at your address, instead of a 404.
• The “Not live yet.” banner disappears from your dashboard.
• The link at the bottom of the rail changes from “Preview your calculator” to “View your calculator”.
• The preview banner disappears from the calculator itself.

Nothing else changes. Your settings, your catalogue, your pricing versions and anything you built while pending are all still there, because pending was never a sandbox.

What an operator can see

Solar Desk operators can activate you, suspend you and preview your calculator. They see counts against your account: how many leads, users and products. They cannot open a lead, and there is no screen anywhere in the operator console that shows one. Your customers’ details are yours.

After you are live

Your first enquiry lands in Leads. From there it is reading a lead, moving it through the statuses, and building a quote.

If you want the other side of this page, the operator’s view of the same three checks is at taking an installer live.