mmitech
Hero image for UK MCS installers

Software for UK MCS installers

Voucher expires in eleven days. My installer’s in Spain. The customer’s signed, the cert’s nearly ready. We’re about to lose the £7,500.

You’re four portals deep on the same install. The MCS cert needs filing within fourteen days of commissioning. The Ofgem BUS voucher was applied for before you started and runs out three months after issue - and your customer is still waiting on a DNO G99 approval that UKPN said six weeks and SSEN bounced last month because the inverter wasn’t on their type-test list. The RECC consumer-code pack she signed in the kitchen has a fourteen-day cooling-off attached, and she’s read about a heat-pump-noise tribunal on a Facebook group. You’re filing every cert by hand. You’re paying nearly six hundred quid a month across Heat Engineer, Spruce, ServiceM8, Dropbox and Xero, and not one of them knows what MCS is.

We make custom software for MCS installers. Small apps and automations that sit on top of what already works for you - Heat Engineer for the design, Spruce where it earns its keep, ServiceM8 or your job-management of choice - and quietly do the bit between Octopus lead landing in your inbox and cert filed, grant reconciled, customer warm, install on the annual surveillance shelf. Not another portal to log into. Not a replacement for the MCS portal that was built in 2008. Tell us what your week looks like and we’ll come back with a sketch.

What you spend your week on that you shouldn’t have to

This isn’t a problem for a generic field-service app. It’s the bit between the Octopus lead landing and the cert filed, sized for a firm running three regulator clocks under a twelve-week customer journey. That’s the bit we build.

A UK MCS installer's week - outdoor ASHP, the design pack, the DNO portal, the cert

Example problems we could solve

Six things we hear most often from MCS installers - with what the solved version looks like in your week. Every job is sized to your business: a sole-trader heat-pump specialist running Octopus referrals probably needs the first two; an eight-van firm running ASHP, solar PV and battery across five DNO regions with a PAS 2035 sub-contract layer might want all six. None of it means binning what works.

1. The aggregator-source agent that triages by programme

The lead-leakage moment: Octopus, Heat Geek, OVO, Greenmark, EDF and British Gas installer programmes each route leads with a different SLA, a different pricing template, and a different audit standard. The £200-per-install Octopus referral isn’t the same conversation as the Heat Geek partner-pricing lead, which isn’t the same as the British Gas tender. One-size-fits-all triage burns the higher-SLA programmes - and aggregator leads are the modal pipeline for most MCS installers under fifteen vans.

Solved looks like: an answer-on-your-behalf line that picks up while you’re commissioning a heat pump - across calls, SMS, WhatsApp, the chat on your website, and the inbound feeds from the aggregator portals you’re enrolled with - and tags each lead by source the moment it lands. The Octopus lead lands on the Octopus cadence with the Octopus template-quote pulled into the first reply, the Heat Geek lead lands on its faster-turnaround partner cadence, the British Gas tender lead lands on the structured-response template the tender expects. Postcode-to-DNO, current fuel, last EPC date, BUS-eligibility - all captured in the first reply, before you’ve left the existing job. The longer version lives at Trainable Inbound AI Agent; the MCS-installer setup reads each programme’s SLA and pricing template separately and triages from there.

2. The pre-survey qualifier - don’t drive an hour to a property that can’t have an install yet

The wasted-Saturday moment: drive an hour to Long Melford on a Saturday morning. Two hours into the survey you realise the loft is bare, her last EPC was 2023, and there’s £600 of insulation and a four-week energy-assessor wait before BUS can even be applied for. She wanted a price. You’re working out how to tell her, in her own hallway, that the install she’s been saving for is six weeks further away than she thought.

Solved looks like: before the survey gets in the diary, the qualifier runs the property against postcode + UPRN - heating fuel, last EPC date, the insulation recommendations on the certificate, the customer-side prerequisites for BUS. Where the install can go ahead, the survey books straight in and your Saturday earns its diesel. Where there’s a pre-work conversation to have (loft insulation, an EPC renewal, an off-mains-gas check, a single-glazed bay), the customer-facing message drafts itself in your voice - “Sarah, before I drive over: your last EPC was 2023 and the loft’s on the recommendations. We’d need an assessor in first; your local one is X, four-week lead time. I can hold a survey slot for the week after they’ve been, or talk you through who I’d send for the insulation if you want to bundle it.” She’s not blindsided in her hallway. You’re not losing the Saturday. Every wasted survey is two qualifying surveys you didn’t run.

3. The twelve-step customer status cascade - survey to grant paid

The “is everything OK” moment: customer’s at Survey done, design issued; rings every other day; sales said six weeks; you’re at week eight because the DNO came back late and her insulation installer slipped a fortnight; she’s started to think you’ve forgotten her. Heat-pump install is a twelve-week project with three regulator dependencies running underneath - MCS, BUS, and the DNO - and customer-side anxiety is the source of half the “is everything OK?” calls because she has no way of telling whether she’s waiting on you, on Ofgem, on her DNO, or on the loft insulator you recommended.

Solved looks like: every install has its own status page on her phone, plain English, one running line - “Survey done. Design issued. DNO submission with UKPN, typical wait six to eight weeks. EPC renewed (thanks Sarah). Loft insulation booked 14 March. Install week: 22 April. Cert filing: within fourteen days of commissioning. BUS redemption: at cert filing. Grant payment to us from Ofgem: typically thirty days.” The what’s next + when line tells her the truth, in her language, refreshed off the system rather than off your memory. Your operator dashboard reads the same status across the install book and flags installs stuck on a step longer than the modal time, so you find out about the slow ones before she does. The longer version lives at Booking & Review Loop; the MCS-installer cascade is shaped around the twelve-week / three-regulator journey rather than the same-day call-out.

4. The balance the customer can read on her phone - the grant flow in plain English

The “have I underpaid you” moment: she paid the £2,000 deposit. She paid £2,000 again on completion. The total install was £11,000. Her statement says she owes £3,500. She rings you for the third time - “have I underpaid you?” - and you’re explaining the BUS grant on the phone from the van. The grant doesn’t map onto a normal deposit-and-final-invoice cycle; nothing she’s bought in her life has worked like this; the explanation has to live somewhere she can read it at half ten on a Tuesday night.

Solved looks like: the day she accepts the quote, the customer sees her own running balance in plain English. “Total install: £11,000. The grant we apply for with Ofgem on your behalf covers £7,500. Your side is £3,500, paid as £2,000 deposit + £2,000 on completion + £−500 balance owed back to you once the grant lands.” One screen, one running line, no calculator. The phone call you keep taking goes quiet, because the answer is on her phone the whole way through. Behind the scenes the £7,500 sits in your books as a tracked Ofgem receivable against the voucher reference; when the BACS lands in your bank feed, it reconciles against the open voucher and the install closes itself. Your operator dashboard splits outstanding by source (her side vs Ofgem’s side) so the cashflow forecast is real rather than a mood. RECC consumer-code wording, fourteen-day cooling-off, deposit T&Cs all sit on the same contract - and the audit trail is timestamped if a RECC mediation opens later. The longer version of the grant-flow build lives at Grant & Submission Handling; the customer-side cashflow ladder lives at Invoice & Dunning Ladder.

5. The cert that issues on the day, not on day twelve

The half-nine-on-a-Friday moment: you told her she’d have her cert in fourteen days. It’s what she chose you on, half the time. Day twelve, you’re chasing the sparky for the commissioning sheet, the design file is still in Heat Engineer, your foreman’s photos are split across two phones, and you’re sat at the kitchen table at half nine on a Friday typing MIS-3005 fields from notes you wrote in the van. Same again next month for surveillance week, only with twelve installs at once.

Solved looks like: every install captures its evidence at the moment the evidence is generated, not at the end. Heat-loss survey lands at survey-day (synced from your Heat Engineer or Spruce export). The design schematic and the hydraulic schematic carry across when the design issues. Commissioning photos come off the foreman’s phone with the standard angles cued up, so nothing’s missing - outdoor unit nameplate, indoor cylinder nameplate, refrigerant pressures, commissioning gauge reading, customer’s emergency-shutoff. The commissioning sheet signs on the tablet, on the day, not on the back of a delivery note. Customer handover signs before you leave site. On commissioning day, the MCS cert pre-fills against the captured evidence - installer detail, install address, MIS-3005 fields, customer detail - and goes out in one tap; the customer copy lands in her inbox the same hour. The same evidence assembles into a per-install audit-ready folder in the background, so when annual surveillance pulls its twelve random installs, the auditor is working from one report rather than your evenings. The fourteen-day cert is the customer’s promise, and it stops being a Friday-night admin job.

6. The DNO submission that doesn’t break the customer’s wait

The bounced-submission moment: sales promised six weeks. SSEN bounced the G99 because the inverter wasn’t on their type-test list. Six weeks lost. Customer rings on week ten asking when her install date is. You’re explaining a re-submission to someone who didn’t know there had been a first one. UKPN, SSEN, Northern Powergrid, Electricity North West and SP Energy Networks each run a different list, a different portal, a different SLA; the inverter that breezes through one bounces from another. The DNO wait is the most visible part of the install to the customer, and the most painful when it slips for a reason that should have been caught at design.

Solved looks like: before you sell the system, the pre-flight cross-checks the proposed inverter and configuration against the DNO’s current type-tested list for the region. If the inverter would bounce, you find out in the design phase, not after submission - and where an alternative inverter from the same manufacturer would clear, the suggestion comes with it. When the spec locks, the G98 (sub-3.68 kW per phase, notify-only) or G99 (export, battery, larger systems) renders in the format that DNO actually accepts - UKPN portal, SSEN PDF, Northern Powergrid email, ENWL portal, SPEN portal - pre-filled from the design. The expected response window pulls automatically into the customer’s status cascade in problem 3, so she’s reading “DNO submission acknowledged, typical wait six-to-eight weeks” on her phone rather than waiting for you to remember to update her. The full build lives at Grant & Submission Handling; the solar-and-battery-shaped version, with the inverter type-test cross-check and the SEG export-tariff handover sitting alongside, lives on the solar PV + battery spoke.

The Friday-night cert that's already filed - the customer copy lands at the end of commissioning day

The closest things we’ve already built

If your week’s narrower than the whole of the above

One sub-audience whose week looks different enough that it has its own page:

Heat-pump specialists who run alongside gas-engineering work should also read the gas-engineers / heat-pump-installer spoke - same MCS MIS-3005 framework, framed from the gas-engineer-into-heat-pump-transition side. If a PAS 2030 / PAS 2035 retrofit-scheme sub-contract is part of your week, that paperwork sits alongside the MCS evidence we already capture; tell us in the scoping conversation and we’ll thread it through.

Adjacent trades and verticals

FAQ

Will you submit the MCS, BUS, or DNO paperwork on my behalf?

No. Each regulator carries an installer-accountability that stays with the engineer of record - the MCS cert is your signature, the BUS voucher application is yours, the G98 / G99 submission is yours. We pre-fill the cert, the voucher and the DNO submission, queue them in the right windows, and bridge to the right portal. You sign, you submit. The assembly is ours; the submission stays yours.

Will the EPC lookup work for properties without a current EPC?

The EPC Register lookup tells you if one exists and what’s on it. If the property doesn’t have a current EPC, the pre-survey qualifier flags it as a customer-side prerequisite for BUS - the “we’d need an assessor in first” conversation happens before the diesel goes on the van, not after.

Will it integrate with Heat Engineer / Spruce?

Yes. Heat Engineer publishes a structured export; Spruce has a similar flow. Heat-loss calc, radiator schedule, cylinder sizing, hydraulic schematic, and the design files carry across into the MCS cert and the customer handover pack so the design never gets retyped. Where you’ve standardised on one design tool over the other, we work to that one and leave the other alone.

Will it handle G98 / G99 across UKPN, SSEN, Northern Powergrid, ENWL, and SP Energy Networks?

Yes for all five DNOs. Each DNO accepts submissions in its own format - UKPN portal, SSEN PDF, Northern Powergrid email, Electricity North West portal, SP Energy Networks portal - and the same install data renders into whichever format that DNO requires. The inverter type-test cross-check runs against each DNO’s current list before the submission goes out.

What about a RECC mediation case - and HIES if I’m enrolled with that consumer-code instead?

RECC is the consumer-code most MCS installers carry; HIES is the alternative for the renewables-side of insulation and external-wall work. The consumer-code pack assembles at sign-off - the fourteen-day cooling-off form, deposit T&Cs, and complaints process all live alongside the contract, in your code’s preferred wording. If a mediation opens, the audit trail (contract sign date, cooling-off acknowledgement, customer-side comms history, photo evidence) assembles on demand. The mediation itself stays yours to run.

My electrical side is NICEIC / NAPIT - does the cert flow handle Part P alongside the MCS cert?

Yes. The electrical commissioning evidence sits alongside the MCS evidence on the same install record - Part P notification, BS 7671 EIC, the test results - and the customer’s handover pack covers both sides as one document. If your sparky is sub-contracted in, their commissioning sheet drops onto the same install record without you retyping it.

What does it cost?

Every build is scoped per firm - depends on install volume, MCS scope (ASHP, GSHP, PV, battery, biomass), aggregator-programme mix, how many DNO regions you cover, and how much of the regulator paperwork you want pre-filled vs. left to the existing portals. We talk it through, agree the scope and the price in writing, then build. Send an enquiry and we’ll come back with a sketch. See pricing for how we work.

How long until something’s live?

Most MCS-installer builds we’ve sketched go from scope conversation to a working version you can run a real Octopus lead and a real customer-status cascade through in a few weeks, then a couple more weeks of running live installs through it before go-live. The cert-on-the-day flow usually lands ahead of the surveillance window so the next audit pulls from one report rather than the evening scramble.

Will you replace Heat Engineer? Spruce? The MCS portal itself?

No. Heat Engineer is great at design and we’d be daft to rebuild it; Spruce is workable if you live in its UI; the MCS portal is what it is. We sit on top of what works and replace the bit that doesn’t - usually the aggregator-source triage, the pre-survey qualifier, the customer status cascade, the grant-flow balance, the cert-on-the-day assembly, and the DNO type-test pre-flight.

Friday-night quiet - the cert filed itself, the customer's already got her copy, the audit pack is one file

Tell us what your week looks like

Send an enquiry - what’s your van count, what MCS scope (ASHP, GSHP, solar PV, battery, commercial), what aggregator-programme mix (Octopus, Heat Geek, OVO, Greenmark, British Gas, direct), what DNO regions you cover, and where the regulator-side paperwork is breaking. We’ll come back with a sketch of what we’d build and what it would cost. No calendar widget, no demo to sit through. Email reply, scoped sketch, you decide.

Tell us what your week looks like

Send an enquiry - what you do, what's slowing you down, what you've already tried. We'll come back with a sketch of what we'd build and what it would cost. No calendar, no demo to sit through.

No calendar widgets. Email reply, scoped sketch.

Tell us what's slowing the business down

Email reply, scoped sketch, you decide. No calendar widgets, no demo to sit through.

No calendar widgets. Email reply, scoped sketch.