HouseRater uses Programs to coordinate the relationship your company has to other organizations. When participating in Utility Rebate Programs, the program is used for sharing houses to the program admin at the utility company. Internal Programs work similarly, but your organization controls the workflow from start to finish in HouseRater.
Programs also store the list of builders you work with. When adding builder clients, select all the programs this builder may participate in. Find more in-depth info on Managing Builders & Contracts on our Help Center. When adding builders to sponsored programs, the system defers the verification of this builder until approved by a program admin, but for Internal Program-only builders, the company is instantly verified and available.
Service Plans in HouseRater
Using Internal Programs, your organization can track the various service plans offered to builder clients. The export system of HouseRater uses programs as the primary status tracking mechanism of houses. By creating several programs for your business at each service tier, you'll be able to follow house's billing and field data in one place.
Imagine these four service tiers: ACM Basic, ACM Advanced, and ACM Pro, allowing your company to provide a mix of offerings. Using Internal Programs, you can monitor houses as they flow through HouseRater and billing software at Acme Ratings. HouseRater allows multiple programs on each house, each with their own statuses and workflows.
Creating an Internal Program
After signing up for HouseRater, your organization already has one simple internal program added, named "ACM HERS Rating"—this program allows you to add new builders right away. You can rename this program, or replace it with new Internal Programs to track houses where it makes sense for your business.
To add a new Program, select the Programs option from the sidebar. From the Programs page, you can click any program to make changes, or select Add New Program to create a new internal program.
Program Workflows
The workflow selector on Programs allows you to define the sequence of statuses that each house follows when that program is added. Below is a quick summary of the flow houses follow in each workflow:
External: Pending, Rejected, Enrolled, [Un-]Submitted, Complete/Flawed/Disqualified — External program workflows require outside program admin approvals for some status progressions.
Internal With Approvals: Enrolled, Submitted, Complete/Flawed/Disqualified
Internal: Enrolled, Complete
Additional Program Fields
You can also define a few other rules to programs, like whether data submitting a program should open a verification box for each house before moving to the Submitted status ("Requires Data Verification"), what day you run billing (used in the program dashboard, "Month End Day"), and various other tracking fields. These data points are optional, and can be changed at any time.
Enrolling a House in a Program
The list of Programs on a house will be filtered down to only show the programs of the Builder for that house. You must add the programs to the Builder Contract before you can enroll a house in that program.
Adding a Program to a Builder Contract
You can view the Managing Builders & Contracts article to learn more about Builder Contracts and how to add Programs to them.
Enrolling a House in a Program
When adding a new house, the list of Programs will we populated from the Builder Contract after a Builder is selected. You can then select any of the programs from that list to enroll your house into.
You can also enroll a house in additional programs after it has been created, by pressing the + button on the Programs panel of the house.