The complete commercial cycle of an installation business: every step between a customer's first inquiry and the paid invoice, run as one connected flow.
Most installation companies run this cycle across five, six, seven disconnected tools. L2I is the discipline — and the software category — of running it as one.
A typical installer's commercial cycle looks something like this. Every arrow between two tools is a seam: a place where someone re-types data, forgets a follow-up, or quotes from an outdated price list.
None of these tools is bad. The problem is the seams between them: every seam is a place where margin leaks — in hours, in errors, and in customers who never heard back.
L2I names the cycle every installation business already runs, whether it manages it deliberately or not. Five stages, four hand-offs — and it's the hand-offs that decide whether the cycle is profitable.
A homeowner or business raises a hand: a form on your website, a call, a referral, a product inquiry. The lead enters a pipeline with a name, an address, and an interest.
The seam: leads captured in one place, worked in another — the inquiry that sat unanswered in a shared inbox for a week.
The job is specified and priced: which products, which quantities, what the customer pays. In an L2I flow the quote is built from a live product catalog and real prices — not copied from the last Word document that looked similar.
The seam: pricing that lives in someone's head — quotes that win the job and lose the margin.
The customer says yes. In an L2I flow this is an event, not an email: the customer reviews a branded proposal online, accepts it there, and the acceptance is recorded on the same record the lead opened.
The seam: the yes that never got written down — scope disputes that start at the front door.
The won quote becomes a project: a planned date, a crew, a materials list derived from the quote itself. The field team sees the schedule and the job details on their phone — the same data, not a printout of it.
The seam: the crew that arrived with the wrong materials — because the quote and the work order were two different documents.
The work is done and the invoice goes out — generated from the same record, reflecting what was actually quoted and actually installed. Bookkeeping stays in your accounting package; the invoice just no longer starts from a blank page.
The seam: the invoice sent three weeks late — because finishing the job and billing the job lived in different systems.
If you've been shopping for "a CRM" or "an ERP" and nothing quite fits, this is why: installation businesses don't have a CRM-shaped problem or an ERP-shaped problem. They have a cycle-shaped problem.
| Covers… | CRM | ERP | L2I platform |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lead capture & pipeline | Yes | Rarely | Yes |
| Quotes from real products & prices | Documents, at best | Yes, but back-office | Yes — customer-facing |
| Customer-facing proposal & acceptance | No | No | Yes |
| Won quote → project, no re-entry | Hand-off | Hand-off | Yes |
| Field team planning & mobile | No | Modules, sometimes | Yes |
| Materials list from the quote | No | From orders, not quotes | Yes |
| Invoice from the same record | No | Yes | Yes |
| One customer timeline, lead → invoice | Until the win | After the order | The whole cycle |
"L2I" is not a badge a vendor can put on a brochure — it's a test you can run against any platform, including ours. A platform is Lead-to-Invoice when all eight hold.
Web forms, product inquiries and calls arrive in the same system that quotes them — not in an inbox next to it.
A quote is a priced bill of materials, not a formatted document. Change the price list and the next quote knows.
The customer reviews, asks, and accepts online — under the installer's brand, not the vendor's.
Accepting a quote creates the project — same products, same prices, same customer record. Nobody re-types anything.
Planning, job details and site notes are on the crew's phones — live data, not this morning's printout.
What was sold determines what gets ordered and what goes on the van. One list, not three versions of it.
Billing is generated from the record that started as a lead — reflecting what was actually quoted and installed.
Anyone in the company can open the customer and read the cycle end-to-end: inquiry, quote, yes, work, invoice.
Score your current stack honestly. Most installation businesses pass two or three of the eight — usually the ones their newest tool was bought for. The gap between "we have software" and "we run Lead-to-Invoice" is the other five.
Keep your current tools and wire them together with integrations and middleware. Honest assessment: every integration is a seam you now maintain yourself. It can work — it rarely stays working.
Some larger installers commission custom software. You get a perfect fit on day one, and a legacy system by year three. Viable above a certain size; expensive below it.
Run the cycle on a platform built around it. Test candidates against the eight criteria — all eight, not the three in the demo. The directory below lists platforms that pass.
Platforms that pass all eight criteria for a specific installation trade. Listed with the trade they serve — L2I is always vertical: the cycle of a solar installer is not the cycle of a plumber.
Disclosure: this site is maintained by the team behind Currently. The criteria are written to be vendor-neutral and falsifiable — if a competing platform passes all eight, it belongs in this list, and we'll put it there.