Ten 50 kW rooftops due in September. The installer is counting crews, not panels
On 1 September 2026 ENERGY S.A. took an order for ten 50 kW installs, all due that month. The same day GUS put the median wage at PLN 7,530.45. In a small PV firm the September jam is the crew diary and a complete kit, not the module price.
On 1 September 2026 ENERGY S.A. reported another delivery order: ten photovoltaic installations of 50 kW each, 500 kW in total, on sites belonging to a nationwide retail chain. The deadline is September 2026. The company did not disclose the contract value.
For a listed issuer that is a portfolio disclosure. For an installer that does not file stock-exchange reports, it is the same month in the diary: several roofs at once, crews that cannot be in two places, and parts that are either in the store or still on a wholesaler’s lorry.
The same day Statistics Poland published the March 2026 wage distribution. The national median gross wage was PLN 7,530.45. In firms with nine or fewer people the median sat on the statutory minimum: PLN 4,806.
A PV installer rarely benchmarks pay against the utilities average. It counts crew-days on the roof and whether the inverter arrives before the scaffolding. A solar installation schedule in September shows whether the order book and the cost of people can be lined up at all.
Ten roofs in a single month
ENERGY S.A.’s order sits under a contract the company already flagged in ESPI report 7/2025. It is not the first batch, only the next tranche. The investor refused to name the chain. The sites are spread out, because a retail network is not in one county.
A 50 kW hall roof is not a day’s work for two people with a ladder. The structure has to be surveyed, rails and modules delivered, the DC crew booked, then AC, the inverter connected, measurements taken and the plant commissioned. Rain, wind or a ban on roof work during shop opening hours shifts the slot by a day or two.
When ten such roofs must go up in September, the office has no slack. One missing set of rails on site three eats the day of the crew that was due on site four in the morning. The client at site four sees an empty roof and a phone call with an apology.
A listed company has a back office. A typical installer has a handful of crews, one person ordering parts, and a spreadsheet in which the columns “plan”, “material” and “done” drift apart after the first week of September.
Crew pay and idle hours on the roof
On 2 September 2026 GUS reported that in March the national median was 22.4 per cent below the average wage (PLN 9,698.95). Year on year the median rose 7.6 per cent, the average 6.6 per cent. Bankier.pl set those figures against the office’s release.
In firms with up to nine people the median stayed at PLN 4,806. Business Insider, using the same report, added that 12.2 per cent of employees did not exceed the minimum wage, and in the smallest firms the share was 46.5 per cent. Many installation firms sit in that size band.
In July 2026 the average wage in construction, according to GUS, was PLN 9,161.67 gross. That is not a PV fitter’s B2B invoice rate. It is a reference point: a crew on a roof is not cheap, and an hour without material is paid the same as an hour with a screwdriver in hand.
When the diary says “install” and the kit is incomplete on site, the firm pays for the drive and the wait. Margin on a 50 kW quote shrinks not on the module price from the wholesaler, but on a day that cannot be sold twice.
Example. A few crews and one September
Picture an installation firm with a few crews. It does hall roofs and houses. In September a run of jobs lands on retail-chain sites — several roofs of a few dozen kilowatts, all due in the same month. In parallel, owners of existing micro-installations ring about a battery for the announced Household Energy Storage programme.
The diary lives in a spreadsheet. The store — modules, inverters, rails, boards — lives in a second file and in the storeman’s notebook. Status from the roof arrives in a messenger: “on the way”, “rain”, “no hangers”, “done”. The office builds the day’s plan from that in the morning. By afternoon the plan is stale.
On Wednesday the crew is standing on a hall because the 50 kW inverter was issued to another job. On Thursday the same crew goes to a house, because “something has to be done”, while the hall waits for a delivery. The retail client calls for a status. Reception reads a thread of twenty messages and cannot say whether the structure is missing or only the commissioning protocol.
In this story one shared job card would do: roof, crew, material list with a goods-issue tick, status from the foreman’s phone. Not a catalogue of features. Two fields that today live in three places.
Who goes to which roof
An installation diary in a small PV firm often looks like a holiday calendar with colours. Columns are days, rows are crews, cells hold an address stub. When it rains or the shop will not let anyone on the roof during opening hours, the cell is dragged with a mouse. Nobody sees at once whether a hoist is booked for the same day.
With one or two roofs a week that works. With ten sites in a month the clash shows up too late: in the morning, after the vans have left. The second crew does not know the first is still on yesterday’s site because the measurements failed and the strings need rework.
A shared installation calendar shows the roof, the crew, the weather window and the rule “we do not roll until the store confirms the kit”. Moving one job immediately shows which later job slips. It is not a weather app. It is a decision list: who, where, with which set.
An off-the-shelf field-service application can be enough when the firm runs call-outs and simple jobs. A PV hall install adds plant hire, quiet hours in a retail building and a DC-then-AC sequence. If a ready-made calendar cannot hold that, the choice is the spreadsheet or an application shaped around that process.
The module is there. The inverter is not
An installer’s store is not a single SKU rack. Modules arrive on pallets, inverters as units, mounting kits for a given roof type, and a battery — if it is in the offer at all — as a separate, expensive device with a serial number. Each line has a different lead time and a different supplier.
In September, when C&I roofs and domestic batteries land together, it is easy to issue an inverter “just in case” to the crew that is closer to base. The hall is left with a structure and no heart. The wholesaler promises “tomorrow”. Tomorrow there is a queue and another priority.
A bill of materials pinned to the job takes that argument out of the messenger. The foreman ticks the issue. The store sees a reservation, not a guess. If something is missing, the calendar does not release the crew. A simple gate. In a spreadsheet someone has to remember it. In a panel it can be a hard rule.
Excel is enough when the firm does a handful of installs a month and one person holds stock in their head. With a run of 50 kW roofs and parallel 10 kWh batteries that person is on leave or on another site. Then “in / out” has to live in one place, not in three notebooks.
What the crew leaves after coming off the roof
An install without a protocol is invisible to the office. The client hears “done”. Accounts has no basis for the final invoice. Service in six months does not know which inverter is on the wall or which string went to which MPPT.
An installation card on a phone closes that day. A photo of the nameplate, the serial number, the measurement, a signature from the site manager or the homeowner. It need not be a utility-grade app. A form attached to the job, filled in with a helmet on, in the sun, with one hand, is enough.
If the crew works on a B2B contract, the card does not replace the agreement. It does show who was on the roof and what they left. In a dispute about a fault a week later the office does not hunt a messenger thread. It opens the job. The same mechanism that, in software built for a PV firm, ties a lead to an install here ties the roof to a document.
The storage call and a file that is not in the van
Alongside C&I roofs, September has a second stream. Household Energy Storage — part 2, funded from the Modernisation Fund, is listed on the NFOŚiGW site for the third quarter of 2026. Gramwzielone.pl wrote on 8 August that the Fund confirmed a September start, without a calendar day. An earlier date of 4 September was taken off the official page. That is a plan, not an open call with a start time.
The rules the paper compiled from the programme documents are specific. Electrical storage: at least 10 kWh, a grant of up to 30 per cent of eligible cost, no more than PLN 800 per kilowatt-hour and no more than PLN 16,000 under net-billing or PLN 8,000 under net-metering. Heat storage up to PLN 1,000. An EU-made hybrid inverter up to PLN 2,000. In total no more than PLN 19,000 per metering point. The edition budget: up to PLN 1 billion. Costs qualify from 1 November 2025.
For the installer this is not a leaflet. It is a queue of calls asking “will we make the application” and a pack of attachments the office will not issue. The household files the form. The invoice, protocol, nameplate photos and DSO certificate with the storage serial are prepared by the firm that fitted the kit.
Gramwzielone.pl lists, among others, these documents without which an application is rejected or sent back:
- an invoice or receipt that names the device and splits the costs
- a bank transfer confirmation or cash receipt — a “paid” note on the invoice is not enough
- a DSO certificate on the current template, with the PPE number and storage data
- a works-acceptance protocol on the required template
- photos of the devices and nameplates, with no graphic editing
- a product sheet or energy label
If those files sit in fitters’ inboxes and in a “PME September” folder, the office assembles the client’s pack late. A file on the job — the same photos the crew already takes for the installation card — shortens the evening in the office. It does not replace NFOŚiGW’s grant generator. It leaves the installer with a set the client can upload to GWD.
Commissioning is not the end of the job
On a retail-chain hall the install ends with a measurement, a protocol and handover. On a house it ends with a notice to the operator and, if there is a battery, the device on the DSO certificate. The status “done” in a messenger blurs that difference. For the client, a battery without DSO paper does not exist in the call.
A separate register of notifications, installation cards and CSIRE is a topic we covered around Moje IRE. Here the earlier step matters: whether the office even knows the roof is up and the notice has not gone out. A September queue turns that into a jam. The crew drives on. The paper is left “for later”. Later is another roof.
A status list on the job — material issued, DC, AC, measurements, protocol, DSO notice, final invoice — is not paperwork for its own sake. It is a queue of work you cannot see from the van. Until the notice is out, the job is not closed, even if the modules are already generating.
When a spreadsheet is enough, and when it is not
One crew, a few roofs a month, a store in the garage: a sheet and a photo folder will do. A ready-made field-service SaaS can also cost less than writing anything. There is no reason to replace a working calendar if clashes are visible to the naked eye.
The strain starts when the same week holds 50 kW halls and 10 kWh home batteries, and PME2 papers need different attachments from a shop-roof protocol. Ready-made construction software handles crews and measured works, but not an inverter card or a DSO certificate. A ready-made CRM handles leads, but not kit reservations from the store.
Integration is often cheaper than a new application: the calendar you have, plus stock from the wholesaler via API, plus a document folder on the client card. The condition is that those three sources can be joined. If the wholesaler does not expose stock, and the crew will not open a third login on the roof, the integration stays a slide.
A dedicated panel makes sense when the process is the firm’s own and repeatable: the same chain-roof type, the same bill of materials, the same photo pack for the application. Then you are not buying “a renewables system”. You are lining up the job queue the way the firm actually drives.
What that means for software built to order
GESOFT builds back-office tools and field apps around a firm’s process, not a generic trade. In PV installation that usually comes down to a few places that hurt at once in September: the crew calendar, material reservation, the card from the roof, the file for the DSO and the grant call, status through to the invoice.
Not every piece needs its own programme. Sometimes it is enough to add statuses to what already exists, or, instead of another SaaS, to put the flow on one job board. The conversation starts with where a crew-day is lost today, not with a module list.
Ten 50 kW roofs in one month is the scale in ENERGY S.A.’s filing. A smaller firm feels the same mechanism on three roofs and ten batteries. The difference is the number of vans. The jam is the same: the diary, the store, the paper after coming off the roof.
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