How Big Dog Solar Cut Site Survey Time in Half & Optimized Their Palmetto LightReach Funding Process
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About Big Dog Solar
Big Dog Solar Energy, founded in 2008, is the Mountain West’s local solar company, headquartered in Pocatello, Idaho, with installation hubs in Boise, Helena, Grand Junction, and Windsor. Big Dog has 16+ years of solar expertise, 100+ customer-focused employees, and has helped over 13,000 homeowners go solar across Idaho, Montana, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and Oregon. The company is 100% in-house, handling everything from design and permitting to installation, commissioning, and long-term service in one shop. As Big Dog puts it, “with every panel comes a promise to provide the highest level of quality service from a dedicated local team throughout your solar journey.”
Alec Nelson, IT Systems Administrator and former Service Department Manager, helped Big Dog’s Administration Team select and roll out SiteCapture. He spent time in the service department before moving into IT, giving him a dual lens on documentation: he knows both the pain of working on a system without the right photos in hand, and the workflow backbone that prevents it. That perspective shaped how Big Dog implemented the platform.
Overview
Big Dog Solar’s documentation workflow used to live in Google Drive, then in a homegrown Google Form that struggled in the low-service rural areas where Big Dog’s crews work. As Palmetto LightReach milestone submissions piled up rejections over missing or wrong photos, the team needed a purpose-built field documentation tool. They rolled out SiteCapture starting with site surveys, with installs and service workflows following close behind. Within months, site survey time was cut in half, first-time LightReach approvals jumped, and milestone-related truck rolls dropped by roughly half.
The Challenge: A Rejection Cycle With LightReach and a Field Workflow That Could Not Keep Up
Before SiteCapture, Big Dog’s technicians dropped photos straight into Google Drive against a checklist, with no real QC on the way in. The team then built a Google Form to try to add structure, but it broke down in the rural pockets of the Mountain West where service is spotty, and it lacked the logic and conditionals needed to enforce the right photos for the right install. The biggest cost showed up downstream with Palmetto LightReach, where every missing photo meant a rejection, an extra truck roll, and erosion of trust with the financier.
Key pain points the team needed to solve:
- A constant LightReach rejection cycle. Milestone submissions were getting kicked back over missing or incorrect photos that should have been captured the first time on site.
- Truck rolls for every rejection. Each rejection meant paying to send a technician back out to recapture a single shot, sometimes for a wrong inverter photo or a missing sub-panel angle.
- A Google Form that couldn’t carry the workflow. It was slow in low-service areas, lacked conditional logic, and offered no live QC of what the field was actually capturing.
- No second set of eyes before activation. Photos went straight into Drive, and gaps weren’t caught until electricians or service techs needed them after the fact.
- Service work hampered by documentation gaps. As the former Service Manager, Alec saw firsthand how hard it is to repair or upgrade a system when the right photos were never captured during install.
The Solution: Purpose-Built Field Documentation, Integrated Directly with Palmetto LightReach
Big Dog rolled out SiteCapture starting with site surveys, the part of the workflow with the highest leverage on downstream funding outcomes. The team built templates with conditional logic so technicians only see the photo requirements that apply to the system in front of them, attached example photos to every required capture so new hires know exactly what good looks like, and turned on SiteCapture’s direct integration with Palmetto LightReach so milestone submissions go in clean.
Onboarding took just a couple of weeks, with a few more weeks to dial the site survey form in. Along the way, SiteCapture’s support team helped Big Dog tailor templates and pushed through a Zapier connector update to fit the platform into Big Dog’s broader process.
Inside SiteCapture, Big Dog’s team:
- Replaced Google Drive and Google Forms with a purpose-built mobile app that handles photo storage and works in low-service areas where their crews operate.
- Built conditional logic and required photos into every template, so the right photos are captured the first time without leaning on technician memory.
- Attached example photos to each required capture, giving technicians a clear visual reference and shortening training time for new hires.
- Submits Palmetto LightReach milestones directly through SiteCapture’s native integration, replacing the old manual upload-and-pray flow.
- Added a QC checkpoint before activation, so missing or wrong photos get caught while the crew is still on site instead of weeks later.
The Results: Faster Site Surveys, Cleaner LightReach Submissions, and Fewer Truck Rolls
In the first months on SiteCapture, Big Dog moved from a rejection-cycle workflow to a documentation system the whole team can rely on. Highlights include:
- 50% reduction in site survey time, down from roughly 2 hours per site on the old Google Form to about 1 hour in SiteCapture.
- 50% more first-time Palmetto LightReach approvals, with conditional and full approvals replacing the near-constant rejections the team used to see.
- Roughly 50% fewer milestone-related truck rolls, since first-time rejections (each one previously triggering a return trip) are now the exception.
- 500+ site surveys documented in SiteCapture in the first months after rollout, with installs and service workflows next in line.
- Documentation that follows the job from site survey to close-out, so whether it’s the homeowner, the financier, or an internal service tech who needs a photo, it’s there.
What's Next for Big Dog Solar?
Big Dog is focused on tightening its Palmetto LightReach funding process and extending SiteCapture from site surveys into installations and service work, including a scope-of-work form that lets service technicians quote stranded customers whose original installers have gone out of business. At the company level, Big Dog is merging with its sales arm and working toward becoming the best regional solar installer in the Mountain West, with SiteCapture as the documentation backbone that scales with them.
Get Started with SiteCapture
Ready to learn how SiteCapture can reduce truck rolls, speed up your site surveys, and streamline TPO financing reporting for your company? Schedule your demo here.
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