About
Active Heating and Renewables is a local heat pump, solar and renewables installer covering Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire and North London. The company has been trading since 2008 and has been installing heat pumps for around 4-5 years.
Over the past year, demand has climbed sharply. Founder Tom Sullivan has watched installation volume grow from one heat pump a week to touching three a week. This demand has come entirely through word of mouth and online presence. Tom found the biggest challenge was just keeping up with it.
"The most difficult part with trying to grow was the paperwork. We were drowning in paperwork and trying to do things manually."
The Challenge
Stitching tools together
Before Spruce, Active Heating's quoting setup was a stack of separate systems that didn't talk to each other. Heat loss calculations went through one piece of software. Costings sat in Excel. Quotes were built in another software on top. Each job meant pulling figures from one platform and re-entering them in another, then looking up prices manually, and piecing the whole picture together by hand. Tom had managed to make the system work, but it was slow and inefficient.
The heat loss software they'd been using made things harder. It wasn't designed for use on iPads or tablets on site, which meant information had to be captured twice. Once roughly during the survey, then again at the desk afterwards.
A full day per quote
From visiting a property to sending the finalised proposal, Tom was spending around a day per job. That covered the heat loss, design and write-up. Most of that time went transferring information between platforms rather than on the work itself. While Tom was at his desk piecing quotes together, he wasn't on site, wasn't quoting new jobs, and wasn't speaking to as many customers. All of which could have grown the company more.
"It was just the time it took to move information over from one place to another. Trying to work between multiple different platforms was the main issue we had."
The Solution
Estimating to proposal in one place
Another heating engineer recommended Spruce, and Active Heating gave it a try.
Tom saw the difference it made to his workflow straightaway. The data that used to be entered across multiple systems now flowed automatically. Pricing, product specifications, heat loss results, customer details all carried through from one stage to the next.
The heat loss carried out during the survey auto-populates straight through to the proposal, so the bulk of the write-up is already done by the time Tom sits down at the desk. From visiting a property to sending the finished proposal now takes a couple of hours, half a day at most.
A front door for new enquiries
The estimating tool also doubles as a lead generation channel. Spruce’s smart enquiry form sits on Active Heating's website, letting potential customers enter their address and get an initial estimate without anyone needing to pick up the phone. If a homeowner is looking at several installers in the area, they’re more inclined to enquire with someone who has something they can give them. This gives Tom's team a qualified lead to follow up on.
For a business that doesn't advertise, that ability for homeowners to find them matters. The enquiries find Active Heating through SEO, Which Trusted Trader and word of mouth. And the same software that handles quoting helps convert them.
"It's a surveying tool, an estimating tool, a marketing tool. It helps from every front, really."
The Results
Key outcomes:
More qualified leads: Up to 10 estimates per week
Reduced survey-to-proposal time: A full day per job → a couple of hours
Increased installation volume: One heat pump per week → three
Approximately £30,000 more weekly revenue since starting with Spruce
Smoother MCS audit: All paperwork already consolidated in one place
With quoting time cut from a day to hours, the freed-up capacity goes straight back into the parts of the job that move the business forward. More site visits, more customer conversations, more jobs won. The bottleneck is no longer paperwork.
The consolidated paperwork proved its worth during a recent MCS inspection. Inspections live or die on whether documentation is in order, and having every document already organised in one place meant the hardest part of the process was done before the inspector arrived. Active Heating passed without the usual stress of pulling paperwork together at the last minute.
"By doing the estimates quicker, we were able to help more customers and get to more jobs."
What if you could win three times as many heat pump jobs this year?
Join 650+ installers like Active Heating who use Spruce to keep up with demand without drowning in paperwork.