Limits and troubleshooting

This page is the honest one. Everything below is either missing, unfinished, or does not do what its label suggests. None of it is a secret and none of it is about to fix itself, so it is better written down than discovered on a Tuesday afternoon with a customer on the phone.

There is no password reset

There is no “Forgot password?” link anywhere for installer staff, on any screen. A forgotten password cannot be recovered by you, by a colleague, or by an admin at your own company.

What to do instead. Store the password properly the moment you create the account: a password manager, or wherever your company keeps its credentials. Not a sticky note on the monitor and not somebody’s memory.

If it is already forgotten, get in touch with Solar Desk and we will reset it for you. Until we do, nobody using that address can sign in, and if they are your only admin, nobody can change your pricing either.

You cannot add a colleague

Roles exist and are enforced, but there is no team management screen and no invitations. Nothing in the dashboard creates a second user.

What to do instead. Ask Solar Desk to add them, and say whether they should be an admin or a rep. The same applies to changing somebody’s role and to removing somebody who has left, which matters more: there is no way for you to revoke a departing employee’s access yourself.

You cannot upload a logo

The branded header your customers see will display your logo, and there is no control anywhere in the dashboard to set one. The Theme page covers colours and wording, not images.

What to do instead. Send Solar Desk your logo and we will put it on your account. Until then the header shows your company name in your chosen colours, which is perfectly presentable and is what the screenshots in this guide show.

“Ask for details before showing the estimate” does nothing

Theme settings offer a checkbox with that label. It saves, it stays ticked, and the calculator never reads it. Customers see their estimate before the contact form either way.

What to do instead. Nothing to do; leave it alone. If capturing details before the numbers is important to you, tell us, because at the moment ticking the box gives you a false sense that you have changed something.

Worth knowing that the default behaviour is also the better one. A customer who never saw a number is a worse lead than one who did, and gating the estimate mostly buys you contact details from people who leave.

A known bug on the first click

Clicking Start your estimate on a calculator can leave the customer on a sign-in page, or appear to do nothing at all. The same fault affects Create your account on the sign-up form: the account is created, but nothing on screen changes.

The workaround is to reload the page. After a reload everything behaves.

Two specific pieces of advice follow from that:

On sign-up, do not click the button twice. The first click usually worked. The second attempt will tell you the web address is already taken, by your own first attempt. Instead go to solardesk.app/login and sign in with the details you just entered.
If a customer tells you the calculator did nothing, ask them to refresh and try again before you assume the link is broken. It is worth knowing about before you send a hundred of them out.

This is a fault in the application rather than in any browser, it reproduces consistently, and it is on the list to fix.

Uploaded files are not scanned for viruses

Nothing uploaded through Solar Desk is checked for malware, in either direction. The homeowner’s own upload page says so, and the same is true of files your team uploads.

What to do instead. Treat a file that arrived from a customer exactly like an email attachment from a stranger, because that is what it is. Your normal endpoint protection is doing all of the work here.

The finance wording is not settled

Where finance is switched on, your calculator shows an APR, a monthly instalment and a representative example, and your quote PDFs carry the same. The representative example is real, it is worked out from your own figures, and it cannot be switched off while finance is on.

What has not happened is a review of the exact wording by somebody who knows UK consumer credit rules. Quoting an APR and a monthly payment is a regulated financial promotion, and this documentation cannot tell you that the current form of words satisfies that regulation, because nobody has yet confirmed that it does.

What to do instead. If you are not authorised to offer credit, turn Show finance options off in Theme settings. Your calculator will then show a total and no monthly figure, and there is nothing to review. If you are authorised, have your own compliance person read the calculator’s estimate step and a sample quote PDF before you send customers to either, and tell us what needs changing.

Smaller gaps

Each of these is a thing the product does not do, listed so that you stop looking for it.

Not there	What to do instead
Renaming a status	Ask Solar Desk; the labels can be changed, there is just no screen for it
Unsending or resending a quote	Amend it as a new version and send that
Attaching a file to a message	Upload it under Documents, tick shared, then send a message saying it is there
A second reminder email	Nothing chases, in either direction. Use the unread badge and the phone
Per-person unread state	Read is read for the whole team. Treat the badge as a shared to-do list
Searching by town or postcode	Export to Excel and filter there
Assigning a lead to a rep	Everybody sees everything. Use a note to say who has it
Deleting a note	Notes cannot be edited or deleted. Add another correcting it

Every figure in this guide is invented

The screenshots throughout this documentation come from a demo account with Solar Desk’s placeholder pricing. Every cost, saving, payback and monthly figure in them is an example, not a market rate, and the same is true of a brand new account of your own until you replace them. That is what the pricing page is for, and it is the one job that has to be finished before a customer sees a number.