The problem
When AFM reopened Casa Verde Fotovoltaice in late 2024 with a 20,000 RON subsidy per household, every PV installer in Transilvania got hit with the same tsunami: 6,400 qualified Meta-ad leads landed on this installer's CRM in 60 days. The sales team of three could call back maybe 80 leads a day. Everything else cooled off and went to whichever competitor answered first.
The bottleneck wasn't the technicians — they had crews and panels. It was the paperwork. A complete Casa Verde dossier is 14 documents per household: cadastral extract, identity, energy bills, building photos, technical sheet, ANRE prosumer notification, DSO connection request (ATR), and the AFM submission itself. Each one has a different format and a different portal. The two back-office staff were spending 4 hours per file and still getting a 38% AFM rejection rate on the first submission — usually for a wrong field on a form nobody had ever filled before.
DSO connection (ATR + PTF) was even slower. Sibiu and Brașov sit under DEER (Distribuție Energie Electrică România), but the same installer also worked Cluj and Mureș counties — each county has slightly different document templates, queue priorities, and inspector calendars. End-to-end, from signed contract to PTF (Proces-Verbal de Punere în Funcțiune), median time was 91 days — and the deposit-refund clock started ticking at 60.
After install, customers expected the prosumer compensation to „just work". It didn't. Romanian dynamic compensation rules changed three times in 18 months, panels sometimes underperformed because a string had been wired wrong, and the installer was getting WhatsApp messages at 11pm asking „de ce nu vinde curentul înapoi?". The owner answered most of them personally.
What we built
We didn't replace the installer's ERP (a legacy Romanian system glued to ANAF e-Factura). We didn't replace the technicians. We put an AI layer between the customer's first form and the moment the meter spins backwards — and between the meter and the customer for the next ten years.
By the start of 2026, three pieces had finally lined up: AFM published a stable Casa Verde 2025 dossier template, the DSOs opened machine-readable status endpoints on their installer portals, and vision-capable models got cheap enough to read a Romanian electricity bill and a roof photo in one pass. We stitched all of it into a single funnel the four founders can supervise from their phones.
- Roof-feasibility bot: the customer uploads a photo of their house from the street plus an electricity bill. A vision model identifies roof orientation, estimated usable m², shading, and the bill-derived annual kWh. Output: a one-pager with a sized 4/6/8 kWp system, expected yield, payback in years, and the Casa Verde net cost — generated in under 60 seconds, before any salesperson touches the lead
- AFM dossier-builder: collects the 14 documents over WhatsApp (one at a time, with retries for blurry photos), validates each against the AFM 2025 template, auto-fills the Casa Verde Fotovoltaice form, and produces a submission-ready PDF in 14 minutes (down from 4 hours) — first-submission rejection rate fell from 38% to 11%
- DSO submission agent: maintains four parallel automations — one each for DEER, Electrica Distribuție, E-Distribuție/PPC, and Distribuție Oltenia — that prefill ATR (Aviz Tehnic de Racordare) requests, attach the right technical sheet, and watch the portal for inspector replies; when the inspector requests a clarification, the agent drafts a Romanian response, the back-office reviews and sends in one click
- Technician routing: every morning, the agent looks at the next 10 days of confirmed installs, crew availability, and the county of each job, then proposes routes that group 2–3 installs in the same county per crew per day — average drive time per install dropped from 2h10 to 47 minutes
- Prosumer onboarding: 48h after PTF, the customer receives a WhatsApp explaining their compensation tier in plain Romanian, with a live calculation of last week's exported kWh and what it's worth at the current ANRE rate — the „de ce nu vinde curentul înapoi?" question dropped to near zero
- O&M monitoring add-on: connects to Enphase, SolarEdge, Huawei FusionSolar, and Growatt APIs depending on the inverter, watches daily yield against the simulated curve, and pings both customer and on-call technician when a panel or string underperforms by 15% for three consecutive days — sold at 19 €/month
- Subsidy-deadline guard: every Casa Verde file has a 12-month installation window from AFM approval; the agent watches each file, fires WhatsApp warnings at T-60, T-30, and T-7 days, and escalates to a human PM when a customer goes silent — the installer hasn't lost a single subsidy to expiration since
- Owner cockpit: a single daily Slack message before the first coffee — Meta CPL, leads qualified, dossiers submitted, ATRs pending, PTFs this week, monitoring alerts, and the cash position with deposits-held vs subsidies-pending
The results after Q1 2026
Installs went from 31/month in Q4 2024 to 99/month in Q1 2026 with the same headcount. The bottleneck moved from paperwork back to where it should have been all along: panel availability and crew capacity on the roof.
Casa Verde first-submission rejection rate fell from 38% to 11%, which roughly halved the working capital tied up in waiting-on-AFM. The owner stopped fronting deposit refunds — median lead-to-PTF dropped from 91 days to 76, and the 60-day refund clock no longer expired before the system was live.
The O&M monitoring product was a surprise. We launched it as a customer-trust add-on at 19 €/month, expecting maybe 30% attach. It hit 71% — Romanian prosumers, burned by tariff-rule changes, will pay for a dashboard that proves they're being compensated correctly. At 71% attach across the existing customer book, that's €940k of recurring annual revenue from a product line that didn't exist 18 months ago.
What we'd do differently
We let the AI dossier-builder auto-submit AFM files when the validator's confidence was above 92%. Within three weeks, AFM bounced 47 files for a single reason: the cadastral extract had been issued more than 30 days before submission, and the auto-submission queue had buffered them past the window. We added a „freshness check" on every document the moment it enters the dossier, plus a human-in-the-loop gate for anything dated past 21 days. Rejections dropped overnight.
We initially auto-replied to DSO inspector requests with the agent's first-draft Romanian. Two DEER inspectors flagged us — one of them off the record — for „robotic" replies that hurt the perceived quality of the dossier and slowed their willingness to push our files. Now the agent drafts, the back-office reviews and sometimes rewrites in three sentences, and inspectors stopped grumbling. Approval throughput actually went up after we slowed down.
Hardest lesson: never let the agent talk to a customer about money. The compensation message used to include a forward-looking estimate („at this rate you'll save 4,800 RON this year"). Three customers screenshot-ed it to the press when their actual savings came in lower. We removed forecasts and switched to „here's what last week paid, here's the rate this week" — only facts that already happened. Trust went up, complaints went down.
"Last winter we were turning down leads because we couldn't keep up with the paperwork. This winter we're turning them down because we ran out of panels. Same team — completely different bottleneck."
— Founder & general manager
