Do you have problems paying you electricity or water bills? Do you want to save money and get advice on how to reduce your energy usage? Do you live in Stoke on Trent, Barnsley, Bolsover and Sunderland or Blackpool and Burnley? Then the new Groundwork Energising Communities programme could be for you!

The latest Fuel Poverty Report from 2020 estimates that 10.3% (or 2.40 million households) live in fuel poverty in England - that is they have required fuel costs that are above average and which would leave them with a residual income below the poverty line.

The Groundwork Green Doctors have already helped thousands of households across England to stay warm and well through its home consultation by trained energy advisors. We at Groundwork GDS have been helping this programme become a success by creating customized CRM systems to register, monitor and delivering visits. The benefit of these systems is that the programmes can store all their data under one platform, easily accessible by its staff, but still securely stored in a cloud environment, to organize all its activities using only one application!

We recently developed one new such application for the Energising Communities team, using Zoho appliances – Zoho Creator for the CRM and Zoho Analytics for reporting and dashboards. For this particular programme, the application was going to be shared between a number of Groundwork Trusts, where the users of one trust will only have access to the data regarding clients in their area. Zoho lets your filter reports based on your own defined criteria which let you restrict user access to records. The way we did this was by first assigning each new registered referral to a Groundwork Trust based on their location, then we filtered each report so the users will only see those records that match their profile. Effectively it's one application, but split into many separate parts!

But how does the system know which clients that belong to which trust? When signing up we ask for the postcode of the household that is interested in a visit. We then use the Postcode API – a free and open source API for UK location data – to return the area code of that postcode. If the area code is within one of the listed Groundwork Trusts that customer will be assigned to that trust. If the area code is not found, the client is deemed ineligible and the user is asked to provide a new postcode. Another great feature is that we can then list all the available addresses of the input for the user to select their own address from a dropdown. This way we ensure greater data quality so that the Green Doctors don’t have to worry about going to the wrong place!

This is just one way that Zoho can be used to create stable and reliable solutions for your project or business. Are you interested in developing your own application? Check out our other custom business applications of work that we have done in the past.