CRM

Insightly and R11

Insightly is a general-purpose CRM used by many solar contractors to hold customers, opportunities, and the custom fields a solar business bolts on over the years to track jobs it was never designed to track.

Where it stops

A general CRM is built to win a sale, not to deliver an installation. So the delivery work gets bolted on as custom fields, and a mature Insightly instance ends up with hundreds of them, added by different people over several years, where the meaning lives in the field label rather than the field name and half of them have quietly stopped being filled in. The record is technically there. Nobody can get a straight answer out of it.

What R11 does with it

• R11 reads the customer and project records your team already maintains, so starting does not mean re-entering your book into a second system.
• Sales keeps working in the CRM it knows. The delivery side of the job moves to a record built for delivery, instead of a widening field of custom fields.
• Where the CRM and another source disagree about the same fact, R11 shows that they disagree rather than silently picking one.

Questions

Do we have to leave Insightly to use R11?

Not to start, and never on anyone's timetable but yours. An installer with years of history in a CRM cannot switch on a Monday, so R11 reads what Insightly holds and nothing has to move on day one. What changes after that is where the work happens: R11 is built to be the record the job itself lives on, so the delivery side comes off the CRM one workflow at a time.

Will R11 change our Insightly records?

R11 writes nothing to Insightly, so your CRM stays exactly as your team left it. What moves is not your data, it is the work: the job record, the tasks, the documents and the funder milestones stop living in custom fields and start living on the project.

What happens to our custom fields?

They are read as they are, including the label a person actually reads rather than the internal field name, because in a long-lived CRM those two drift apart. R11 does not require you to clean up, rename, or restructure your fields before it can read them.