Every field service tool sold to solar installers has a tidy list of features on the pricing page: scheduling, invoicing, job tracking, customer profiles. Callbacks and defect work, if they appear at all, are a bullet point near the bottom. The vendors building job management software for solar jobs (WorkBuddy, n.d.) and the ones pitching job management for solar companies (Klipboard, n.d.) treat the return visit as a minor scheduling event. Book a tech, close the job, move on.
That framing is fine if you fit gutters. It is dangerous if you install solar. In this trade a return visit is not just a logistics problem. It can be the visible end of a workmanship warranty obligation, a statutory guarantee under Australian Consumer Law, or a condition attached to the accreditation that lets you create certificates at all. Get the paperwork wrong on one of those and you have not just annoyed a customer. You have built a hole in your own defence for the day a complaint or an audit lands.
I have spent twenty years on the supply and admin side of this industry, and the pattern is always the same. The install side gets all the systems and attention. The defect side gets a text message, a memory, and a promise to “sort it next week”. Then six months later someone needs to prove what was done, and there is nothing to prove it with.
A callback and a defect rectification job are not the same thing
Start here, because almost everyone runs these two as one category and it is the root of the mess.
A callback is any return visit. The customer rang, you are going back. Maybe the app is not pairing, maybe they want the monitoring explained again, maybe a cable clip came loose. Most callbacks are nothing.
A defect rectification job is a callback with a legal spine. It is the return visit that exists because something you were obligated to deliver was not delivered to standard. That obligation comes from one of three places, and they stack on top of each other.
The first is your workmanship warranty, the promise your business made on the quality of the install itself. The second is Australian Consumer Law, which gives the customer statutory guarantees that the work was done with due care and skill and that the goods are of acceptable quality, and those guarantees apply regardless of what your written warranty says (energy.gov.au, n.d.). You cannot contract out of them. The third is your accreditation. Installer accreditation in this country moved from the Clean Energy Council to Solar Accreditation Australia in 2024, and it carries conditions about installing to standard and standing behind the work (Solar Accreditation Australia, 2024).
When you run callbacks and defect jobs in one undifferentiated bucket, you treat the job that carries all three of those obligations exactly the same as the one where the customer forgot their app password. The serious one gets the same one-line note and the same casual close. That is the failure. Name the two job types separately in your system, or the important one will keep hiding among the trivial ones.
What “close” actually means to a regulator
Here is the part the FSM vendors never mention, because it is not their problem until it is yours.
The Clean Energy Regulator requires installers to keep supporting documentation, including the geotagged install photos, for a minimum of five years, and its audits can reach back across that whole window (Clean Energy Regulator, n.d.). A defect on a system is precisely the kind of event that draws scrutiny, because it is often what triggers a complaint in the first place. So “closed” cannot mean what it means in a generic job app, which is “the tech marked it done”.
For a rectification job, closed has to mean four things are true and stored together against the original install:
The fault is described in plain terms, with the date it was reported and how. The work done to fix it is recorded, with before-and-after photos and the parts replaced. The customer has been told, in writing, what was wrong and what you did about it. And the whole chain is attached to the original job record, not floating in a separate callback list that nobody links back.
If you cannot reconstruct the full story of that defect from your records alone, six months later, with the original tech no longer working for you, then the job is not closed. It is just quiet. There is a difference, and the difference shows up at the worst possible moment.
The workflow, start to finish
Strip away the software talk and a defensible rectification process is just a sequence you run the same way every time.
Log it the moment it comes in. Capture who reported it, when, by what channel, and what they actually said is wrong. The first description matters, because it frames everything after. A voicemail that never makes it into the system is a defect that officially never happened.
Triage and prioritise it. This is where the callback-versus-defect distinction earns its keep. A genuine defect, especially a safety one, jumps the queue ahead of new installs. New work is more profitable and more fun, which is exactly why defects get bumped and bumped until a customer escalates. The discipline is to let the obligation set the priority, not the revenue.
Assign it with the liability in mind. Decide in-house or subcontractor, and record who is doing it and under what arrangement. If the original install was done by a subbie, this is the moment the accountability chain has to be clean.
Capture the evidence on site, not from the desk the next day. Photos of the fault, photos of the fix, serials if anything was swapped, and the customer’s acknowledgement. This is the same on-site capture discipline I bang on about for installs, and for the same reason: the next-day reconstruction is always worse than the real thing. I have written before about spot-checking install quality before the customer ever complains, and a rectification job is just that instinct arriving late.
Close it with a notification and a record. Tell the customer in writing, store everything against the original job, and mark it closed only when the four conditions above are met.
Subcontractor accountability is where it gets sharp
This is the part installers get most wrong, and it is worth being blunt about.
If a subbie did the original install and the defect traces back to their work, the customer’s rights still run against your business. You held the contract, your business almost certainly made the certificate claim, and the accredited installer named on the job is the one who answers for it. The customer does not have a relationship with your subcontractor. They have one with you. Your ability to recover from the subbie is a separate matter, governed entirely by the agreement you signed with them, and general construction guidance makes clear that the principal contractor usually wears the consumer-facing responsibility while pursuing the subcontractor under the contract between them (Queensland Building and Construction Commission, n.d.).
What that means operationally is simple. Your job record has to show who installed the original system, who attended the rectification, and what the agreement between you said about defect liability. If your system cannot tell you, eighteen months on, which subbie was on a given roof and what they were responsible for, you have no clean way to push the cost back where it belongs. You eat it. I have covered the front end of this in managing solar subcontractors without the chaos; the defect record is the back end of the same accountability problem.
Why generic tools leave you exposed
Bring it back to the software, because that is the real gap. The generic field service tools are not bad products. They are just built for a world where a callback is a callback. They have no field that says “this job exists because of an accreditation condition”. They have no rectification-specific job type that forces the four close conditions. They have no audit trail depth that lets you hand a regulator a clean chain from fault report to written customer notification.
So they let you close a defect job with a one-word status and an empty notes box, and everything looks tidy right up until the day it matters and there is nothing underneath.
CurrentFlow is the platform I am building because I watched this gap cost good operators real money and real sleep. The idea is to make defect rectification a first-class job type, not a footnote: a separate workflow that distinguishes a routine callback from a liability-carrying obligation, captures the evidence on site, tracks who installed and who rectified, and will not let you mark the job closed until the record is actually defensible. It is pre-launch, so I am not going to pretend any of it ships today. I am going to ask whether this is a problem worth solving for your business.
Remember what STCs actually are while you are at it, because it sits underneath all of this. They are not a rebate. They are tradeable certificates created from a compliant install’s deemed generation, which liable entities must surrender to the Regulator, and the accredited installer’s compliance is what makes them valid in the first place (Clean Energy Regulator, n.d.). A defect that calls your compliance into question is not just a customer-service issue. It can reach all the way back to the certificates you created off that job.
Fix the process first. Separate the two job types, let the obligation set the priority, capture evidence on site, and never mark a defect closed until the record would stand up on its own. Do that and the software is just there to make it faster. Skip it and no software will save you.
If this is the corner of the business quietly costing you, get on the early access list and help shape what gets built. The advice above stands on its own either way.
References
Clean Energy Council. (n.d.). Feedback and complaints. Clean Energy Council. https://cleanenergycouncil.org.au/for-consumers/feedback-complaints
Clean Energy Regulator. (n.d.). Create small-scale technology certificates. Australian Government, Clean Energy Regulator. https://cer.gov.au/schemes/renewable-energy-target/small-scale-renewable-energy-scheme/small-scale-technology-certificates/create-small-scale-technology-certificates
Clean Energy Regulator. (n.d.). Rooftop solar installers and designers. Australian Government, Clean Energy Regulator. https://cer.gov.au/schemes/renewable-energy-target/renewable-energy-target-participants-and-industry/rooftop-solar-installers-and-designers
energy.gov.au. (n.d.). Warranties and insurance. Australian Government. https://www.energy.gov.au/solar/get-know-solar-technology/warranties-and-insurance
energy.gov.au. (n.d.). Dispute resolution. Australian Government. https://www.energy.gov.au/solar/solar-retailers-and-installation/dispute-resolution
Klipboard. (n.d.). Job management software for solar companies. Klipboard. https://klipboard.io/industry-sectors/solar-installer/
Queensland Building and Construction Commission. (n.d.). Accountability for subcontractor defects procedure. QBCC. https://www.qbcc.qld.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/guide-accountability-subcontractor-defects-procedure.pdf
Solar Accreditation Australia. (2024). About accreditation. Solar Accreditation Australia. https://saaustralia.com.au/about-accreditation/
WorkBuddy. (n.d.). Job management software for solar jobs. WorkBuddy. https://workbuddy.com/industry/job-management-solar/
FAQ
Is a warranty callback the same as a defect rectification job?
Not from a compliance point of view. A callback is any return visit a customer asks for, and most are trivial. A defect rectification job is one tied to an obligation: a workmanship warranty, an Australian Consumer Law guarantee that the work was done with due care and skill, or a condition of your accreditation (energy.gov.au, n.d.; Solar Accreditation Australia, 2024). Run them as one category and you will treat the liability-carrying job with the same casual urgency as a forgotten app password.
Who is liable when a subcontractor caused the defect?
The accredited installer named on the job and the business that signed the contract and made the certificate claim carry the consumer-facing liability, no matter who was on the roof. The customer’s rights run against your business. Your recourse against the subbie is a separate matter, governed by the agreement between you, which is the same principle that applies across construction more broadly (Queensland Building and Construction Commission, n.d.).
How long do I have to keep defect and install records?
Treat five years as the floor. The Clean Energy Regulator requires installers to retain supporting documentation, including photos, for at least five years, and audits can reach back across that window (Clean Energy Regulator, n.d.). A defect is exactly the kind of event that draws a complaint or an audit, so the rectification record needs to survive at least as long as the original job record.
What does “closed” actually mean for a rectification job?
Not “we went back and had a look”. Closed means four things are true and stored together: the fault is documented with the report date and channel, the fix is evidenced with photos and parts, the customer has been notified in writing, and the whole chain is attached to the original job. If you cannot reconstruct the story from the record alone months later, the job is not closed. It is just quiet.
Where can a customer escalate if I do not fix a genuine defect?
It pays to know the path your customers can take, because it tells you how exposed you are. There are published dispute-resolution avenues for solar, including the relevant state energy or fair-trading bodies (energy.gov.au, n.d.), and the Clean Energy Council runs a feedback and complaints channel for issues involving its signatories (Clean Energy Council, n.d.). A clean rectification record is your best protection if a customer ever walks one of those paths.