Accept crypto payments as a solar installer — the deposit, the equipment bill and the final balance

Why getting paid is the hardest part of a solar installation

Solar installers do not usually lose money on the engineering. They lose it in the gaps — the days between a customer signing and a deposit clearing, between a deposit clearing and modules being released by the distributor, between commissioning and the utility's sign-off, and between the final invoice and the day someone in the household actually pays it.

Nobody sells a rooftop array the way you sell a coffee. A residential job is typically staged: a modest deposit at contract signature, a second payment when the customer approves the final design and structural survey, the bulk of the balance when materials are delivered or on the first day of installation, and the remainder after inspection and interconnection. Commercial work is the same shape with bigger numbers and a procurement department attached.

Underneath that schedule sits a much less flexible one: the equipment bill. Modules, inverters, optimisers, batteries, racking and balance-of-system are bought from distributors on a deposit, on your own working capital, or on net-30 supplier credit. Whichever model you use, there is a moment where you have committed to a five-figure purchase order and the customer's money is either not in your account yet, sitting in a processor's payout queue, or reversible.

Four structural facts make solar payments harder than the invoice suggests.

First, the ticket is too big for cards and too small for a bank's project finance desk. A card processor that will happily take a $200 order treats a $22,000 one as an underwriting event: single-transaction caps, velocity limits, a review, or a percentage fee that consumes a meaningful share of the job's gross margin. Most installers respond by simply not offering cards for the full amount — which pushes the transaction onto bank transfer and its own delays.

Second, the money is prepaid and the delivery is months later. That combination — pay now, receive value much later — is precisely the pattern card risk teams dislike, because if the contractor fails to deliver, the acquirer refunds the cardholder out of its own pocket. It is also the pattern that produces rolling reserves and long payout holds for home-improvement merchants who do get approved.

Third, equipment is priced in dollars and often bought across a border. Modules and inverters are a globally traded, dollar-quoted commodity. An installer in Latin America, Southern Europe or Africa collects in local currency and pays in USD, sometimes by international wire that takes days, costs a fixed fee regardless of size, and occasionally triggers compliance questions from a bank that does not understand why a small contractor is sending $40,000 to a distributor abroad. Every day of that lag is exchange-rate exposure on a fixed-price quote you already signed.

Fourth, the dispute window outlives the job. Under the Visa Core Rules, a cardholder's right to dispute runs long after delivery — and for services delivered over an extended period, later still. A solar customer has months of production data, a first electricity bill that did not drop as much as they hoped, and a bank that will take their call. You have a signed contract and a process you do not control.

Five money moments in a solar job, and where each one sticks

• The signing deposit. Often 30–50% on a cash purchase, and the reason you can order equipment at all. Collected by bank transfer, it depends on the customer's banking app, their daily limit and their willingness to type an IBAN correctly. Collected by card, it is expensive and reversible.
• The design-approval or materials draw. The moment the purchase order goes to the distributor. This is the payment that decides whether you fund the job or the customer does.
• The equipment payment out to the distributor or importer. Frequently cross-border, frequently in USD, frequently urgent, and usually on the slowest rail you own.
• Install week. Subcontracted crews, an electrician, a roofer, sometimes a crane or scaffolding — paid per job, often the same week, often partly in cash because nobody wants to wait for a transfer.
• The final balance at commissioning. The largest single amount, collected at a house or a warehouse roof where there is no terminal, no office and frequently no good mobile signal — then chased by email for three weeks.

What the gap between the deposit and the equipment bill actually costs

You become the bank, at your own expense. Every installer who has self-funded a materials order knows the arithmetic: working capital that should be paying salaries is instead parked in a pallet of modules in a warehouse for three weeks. Do that on four jobs at once and the business is cash-poor in the middle of its best quarter.

Payment-schedule friction kills conversion at the top. A customer who was ready to sign on Tuesday cools by Friday because sending $9,000 by transfer felt like a bigger decision than saying yes. Deposits that are easy to pay get paid. Deposits that require a branch visit, a limit increase or a call to the bank's fraud line sometimes never arrive at all.

FX moves while you wait. You quoted a fixed price in local currency based on a dollar equipment cost. The customer pays eleven days later. The distributor's invoice is unchanged in USD but materially larger in your currency, and there is no line in the contract that lets you pass it on. On a thin-margin job, one bad fortnight is the margin.

A dispute after commissioning is a loss you cannot recover. Unlike a returned product, you cannot take a rooftop array back. If a $18,000 payment is reversed months later, the panels are on the roof, the crew was paid, the distributor was paid, and you are litigating with a homeowner over a decision their bank already made.

Cash at the site is its own tax. Final balances paid in notes mean counting, carrying, banking and the uncomfortable conversation when the number is short. It also means no clean audit trail for a job you may need to evidence for a warranty claim years from now.

The crew that waits is the crew that leaves. Good installation teams are scarce and mobile. The contractor who pays on Friday keeps them; the one who pays "as soon as the customer's transfer clears" competes for whoever is left.

And in 2026, there is less room to absorb any of it. With the US residential credit gone for systems completed from January 2026, a chunk of the customer's effective discount disappeared and price pressure landed on the installer. Payment cost stopped being a rounding error the moment the headline price stopped being subsidised.

Why cards and bank transfers fail on a five-figure solar ticket

These are not implementation problems. Each rail is failing exactly as designed, because it was designed for a different shape of transaction.

Card acceptance is a guarantee, not a pipe. An acquirer stands behind your delivery. On a prepaid, long-lead, high-value contract, that guarantee is expensive to give, so you get one of three answers: a declined application, a low single-transaction ceiling, or a premium rate plus a reserve held against future disputes. None of those is compatible with using the deposit to buy the equipment.

Card payments stay reversible long after the roof is finished. The dispute is decided by the customer's issuer, using evidence you upload into a process you do not run, at a point when the physical goods are permanently attached to their house. We wrote the general version of this in reducing chargebacks on your online store; on a solar job the asymmetry is far worse, because there is nothing to return.

Bank transfers are final but slow, manual and error-prone. A domestic transfer clears when the banks feel like it; a cross-border one takes days, costs a flat fee that punishes smaller draws, and arrives net of an FX spread you did not choose. Reference fields get mistyped, two customers pay identical round numbers on the same morning, and someone in your office reconciles it by hand.

Custodial processors put a balance between you and your money. Even where a payment succeeds, a processor that holds funds on your behalf decides when you receive them — T+2, T+7, or "pending review" during the week you needed to pay a distributor. A balance that exists is a balance that can be held. That is the mechanism a non-custodial processor removes entirely.

And none of them help the outbound side. Paying eight subcontractors on Friday and a distributor abroad on Monday is, on traditional rails, eight manual transfers plus a wire — each with its own fee, cut-off time and failure mode. The same problem we covered for construction companies collecting progress draws shows up here in a compressed, more seasonal form.

How Payzum handles crypto payments for solar installers

Payzum is a non-custodial, crypto-only payment processor. Both halves matter for a business that buys in dollars and gets paid in stages.

Non-custodial means the money never sits in a Payzum balance. Your customer pays from their wallet to a wallet you control. There is no settlement account, no payout schedule, no rolling reserve and no risk desk deciding which Thursday you get your deposit. The settlement is the payment — so the deposit you collected at 10:00 is available to send to your distributor at 10:01.

Crypto-only means the payment is final once confirmed on-chain: roughly 0.4 seconds on Solana, around two seconds on Base and Polygon, with network fees measured in cents rather than a percentage of an $18,000 job. Final means final — no dispute window, no representment, no ratio to monitor. Switch on auto-convert to USDC or USDT and "crypto" stops meaning price exposure: whatever the customer sends, what lands in your wallet is a dollar stablecoin, which is the same unit your equipment is priced in. (USDT vs USDC for payments covers the differences.)

The instruments, mapped to how a solar job actually gets paid

• Payment links and buttons — the signing deposit. No-code. Generate a link for the agreed deposit, drop it into the proposal email or send it over WhatsApp while you are still at the kitchen table. The customer taps, pays, and you see the confirmation before you have packed up the laptop. No IBAN, no transfer limit, no branch visit.
• Invoices with expiry, reference and overpayment detection — the milestone draws. Issue the design-approval draw and the materials draw as invoices carrying your job number as the reference, with an expiry that matches your contract terms. Two customers paying identical round amounts stop being a reconciliation puzzle, and the system flags the one who rounds up or pays two draws in a single transaction.
• POS with a fresh QR per sale — the balance collected at the site. Any phone or tablet is the terminal. At commissioning, the technician opens the app, enters the remaining balance, shows the QR, and watches it confirm before leaving the property. No terminal to carry, no signal-dependent card reader, no "I'll transfer it tonight". Give each technician a PIN with per-user analytics so every collection is stamped with who took it. More in Payzum POS.
• Recurring subscriptions — O&M, monitoring and cleaning plans. The annual maintenance contract, the monitoring subscription, the quarterly panel clean. A renewal settled on-chain cannot be reversed by a phone call and does not die when a card expires or a processor changes its mind. See crypto subscriptions without chargebacks.
• Mass payouts by CSV and EVM stablecoin payouts — crews, subcontractors, referrers. One file, one batch: the installation team, the electrician, the roofer, the scaffolder, the referral commission for the neighbour who introduced the job. Stablecoins on Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, BNB Chain or Avalanche, plus BTC, LTC and DOGE batches. Format and flow in crypto mass payouts, and the contractor-specific version in paying contractors in stablecoins.
• Hosted checkout and the drop-in plugin — the online side. If you sell kits, batteries, EV chargers or accessories from a webshop alongside the install business, the drop-in plugin adds "pay with USDC" next to your card gateway.
• REST API with signed webhooks — automation. Mark a job stage paid in your CRM the moment the draw confirms, release a purchase order automatically, or notify the scheduler that the crew can be booked. API keys, an integration playground and signed webhooks so your systems can trust the event.

Honest scope: what this does not do

It does not make you licensed, and it is not financing. Your electrical certification, installer accreditation, structural and permitting obligations, interconnection agreement with the utility, warranty terms and consumer-protection duties are exactly as they were. Payzum runs KYC on merchants. If your market regulates door-to-door sales, cooling-off periods or the deposits a contractor may take before delivery, those rules apply on every rail — including this one.

It is also crypto-only: Payzum settles in crypto to your wallet, with optional auto-convert to USDC or USDT. It does not deposit fiat into a bank account. Moving stablecoins onward — to an exchange, a treasury, a distributor who invoices in dollars — is a separate decision with your own providers. And because on-chain payments are final, a refund under your cancellation policy is a payment you initiate, which means your cancellation and cooling-off terms need to be written down and accepted before you need them.

Finally, most installers run this alongside their existing methods rather than instead of them. Every job paid this way is one with no percentage fee, no reserve and no reversal risk — and, more practically, one where the deposit is spendable the moment it arrives.

How to set up crypto payments for your solar business, step by step

1. Create the merchant account and connect your wallet. Sign up at merchant.payzum.com, complete KYC, and enter the wallet address you control — a company wallet, a hardware wallet, or an exchange deposit address if that is where you want dollars to land. Payzum never holds a balance on your behalf.
2. Pick your chains and switch on auto-convert. Enable the networks your customers actually use — Solana, Base and Polygon confirm in seconds and cost cents — and turn on auto-convert to USDC or USDT so every deposit and draw settles as a dollar stablecoin, the same unit your equipment is quoted in.
3. Build your payment schedule as reusable templates. A payment-link template for the signing deposit, an invoice template for the design-approval draw and the materials draw with your job number as the reference field, and an expiry that mirrors your contract. Create them once; reuse them on every quote.
4. Put the POS on the install crew's phones. Add each technician as a user with their own PIN so the final balance can be collected at the property, at handover, with a fresh QR per job and a per-technician report on Monday.
5. Wire up payouts and webhooks. Build the crew and subcontractor CSV once and reuse it weekly; point a signed webhook at your CRM or job-management tool so a confirmed draw automatically moves the job to the next stage and releases the purchase order.

There is no acquirer application, no underwriting queue and no hardware to order. Most installers can send their first deposit link the same day they sign up.

Use cases across solar and renewable installation

Four situations we see repeatedly, with the instrument that fits each.

• The residential installer who orders modules on the deposit. An 8 kW rooftop, a 40% deposit agreed at the kitchen table. The customer taps a payment link on their phone before the salesperson leaves; the stablecoins are in the company wallet in seconds, and the purchase order to the distributor goes out that afternoon instead of the following Tuesday. Two weeks removed from the job's calendar, and the quote's exchange-rate exposure closed on day one rather than day eleven.
• The commercial EPC collecting staged draws on a warehouse roof. A 250 kW system, four draws, a procurement department that pays on its own schedule. Each draw is an invoice with the PO number as its reference and an expiry matching the contract. Overpayments and double-payments are flagged automatically instead of surfacing in a month-end reconciliation, and each draw is final the moment it confirms — so the next stage of work starts on certainty, not on a pending status.
• The installer working off-grid and rural sites. Farms, remote clinics, telecom huts, holiday properties at the end of a dirt road. There is no card terminal and often no reliable line, but the customer has a phone. At commissioning the technician shows a QR for the final balance and confirms it on the spot — the crew does not leave a five-figure receivable behind them, and the office does not spend three weeks chasing it.
• The contractor paying crews, subcontractors and referrers weekly. Twelve installers, three electricians, a scaffolder, and four referral commissions between $150 and $900 — some of them to people in another country. One CSV, one batch, paid on Friday in dollars for cents in network fees, with a record of every payment. The seasonal peak stops meaning a day of manual transfers, and the best crews stay because they always get paid on time.

Payzum vs cards and bank transfers for a solar installer

Common objections from installers, answered

"My customers are homeowners, not crypto people."

Some are not, and you are not replacing your existing methods — you are adding an option that costs nothing on the jobs where nobody uses it. But look at who actually buys residential solar: people making a five-figure, long-horizon decision to hedge against rising energy prices. In dollarised and inflation-exposed markets, that is very often the same household that already keeps part of its savings in USDT. Commercial and agricultural clients skew further still. Turn it on, offer it on the proposal, and let the take-up tell you the size of the audience.

"A five-figure payment in crypto sounds risky."

The risk that matters on a large payment is reversal and custody, and this rail removes both. The payment confirms on-chain to an address you control, it is final, and no third party can hold it. What replaces the old risks is an operational one: sending to the right address. That is why the deposit link, the invoice and the POS QR all carry the destination for you rather than asking anyone to retype an address — the same discipline we describe in verifying payout wallets.

"I don't want to hold something volatile while a job runs for two months."

You do not have to. Auto-convert settles every deposit and draw as USDC or USDT, dollar stablecoins, regardless of what the customer sent. That is the same unit your modules and inverters are priced in, which is why several installers find this reduces the currency exposure they were carrying between the quote and the distributor invoice, rather than adding to it.

"What about refunds and cancellations?"

On-chain payments are final, so a refund is a payment you send from your own wallet. That is a change in process, not a loss of protection — but it means your cancellation terms, cooling-off period and the treatment of a deposit once equipment has been ordered must be written into the contract and accepted before work starts. Most installers already have those clauses; this rail simply makes them the operative ones instead of a card issuer's policy.

"Is managing a wallet a lot of work?"

Set it up once — a wallet address, 2FA, a PIN for each technician — and the day-to-day is a link, an invoice and a dashboard. The one genuinely new responsibility is your wallet's keys, which is the same duty of care you already apply to your business banking, with better tooling. Payzum's own stack covers the account side with 2FA, encrypted secrets, signed webhooks and a full audit log; the money itself is never in Payzum's hands to lose.