Nuvo | How BayWa Solar transformed their credit application process—and got 48 hours/month back

William Doring will tell you his AR team is irreplaceable. 

“I can’t replicate Sonya and Jena,” says the CFO of BayWa Solar Systems when he refers to the team managing their credit operations.  “And it doesn’t work to just keep adding people when you don't have the proper tools to support a fluid process for the people doing the work.”

So they found a better solution.

The fast-growing solar distributor had a thorough customer onboarding and credit application process, but it was held together with email threads, generic web forms, and a lot of manual legwork. 

The Sonya mentioned above is Sonya Moyle, the team’s Credit and AR Manager. And Jena Brewer is the AR Staff Accountant managing the day-to-day flow of credit applications. Here’s what the process looked like for them before they brought on Nuvo: 

1. A sales representative would trigger an application through NetSuite, hoping to pick the right one for the right contact, and send it off.
2. The customer would fill out a generic web form (with no validation or guardrails in place), sign it through Adobe Sign, and send it back. 
3. Sonya and Jena would then manually import the data, clean it up, and begin the real credit review and customer onboarding work: TIN matching by hand, tracking down certificates of good standing, chasing trade references on custom forms that went out via email and came back however they came back.

When all of the above went perfectly, it took two to four business days to approve and onboard a new customer. But, of course, everything didn’t always go perfectly. One hiccup in the process could delay it for days: “If a customer would fill out the whole form but pause when they got to the terms and conditions because they couldn’t sign it, there was no way to forward on the application,” Sonya told us. They would have to start over from scratch with the signer filing out the form. 

Not to mention, the sales team had no visibility into the application process. Was something holding up the process? Were their new customers being approved? To get answers to any of these questions, the sales team needed to reach out to the account team directly. 

“We were manually doing TIN matches, manually looking up certificates with the state. It was really just a lot of manual legwork.” —Jena Brewer, AR Staff Accountant

With roughly half of the applications hitting some kind of snag, the team aimed to get through applications in two to four days, but five to seven was closer to the reality. And credit application processing wasn’t the only responsibility of the team: They juggled this while also managing AR and customer onboarding for a rapidly expanding distribution business. 

In addition to speed, they were worried about how many sensitive financial documents—bank information, financials, trade references—were being exchanged over email. For a company owned by a German parent company with strict data requirements, as well as increasingly sophisticated customers demanding stronger security, the team knew they needed to find a better solution to replace their manual process.

The core idea was simple: Replace the patchwork of emails, web forms, and manual lookups with a single, secure platform where customers could submit applications, sign documents, and provide trade references without anything falling through the cracks. 

And what BayWa found was more than just a cleaner version of what they already had in place. 

In what Sonya calls a “choose your own adventure” application process, different applicants need to be routed through different onboarding workflows. Where the old process required the sales representatives to select the application requested by the customer, Nuvo now does this automatically guiding the customer through the process. Here’s their new process: 

• The customer chooses the application type that best suits their needs for establishing a partnership (prepay, credit, direct-pay financing). 
• The customer fills out a validated, structured application on a secure platform.
• Trade references go out electronically and come back the same way, in a consistent format, to the correct employees authorized to receive this data.
• TIN matching, certificates of good standing, and fraud checks happen automatically in the background.
• Relevant application data syncs into NetSuite, and the sales team gets real-time visibility into every application's status in both Netsuite and Nuvo.

The trade reference piece was a particular revelation for the team.

BayWa was rolling out new trade credit insurance at the exact same time the team was onboarding Nuvo (a “double whammy project,” as Sonya puts it), which suddenly meant they had a new minimum trade reference requirement for all credit customers. Under the old process, that would have meant more forms, more emails, more unanswered requests. 

With Nuvo, competitors in the solar industry, who might have historically been reluctant to share information with a sales team, are willing to respond to a credit department on a platform they recognize and trust. “We keep seeing more and more names come on board,” Sonya says. “And anytime a reference goes out to another Nuvo user, they’re very quick to respond because they know the system. They know it's safe.”

“We’ve basically been able to customize and make Nuvo our own.” —Sonya Moyle, Credit and AR Manager

Then there was the fraud piece, something BayWa hadn't even anticipated. Nuvo's built-in verification surfaced red flags that previously would have either taken significant time to uncover, or slipped through entirely. Layered on top of their own AI-assisted due diligence using Copilot, the team found themselves catching fraudulent applications at a rate they hadn't seen before. “I feel like we've been able to find fraud faster,” Sonya says. 

And key data feeds cleanly into NetSuite. Sales team members can find updates on applications without having to chase down the credit and AR team. The data visibility piece is something the team has seen a lot of value in.

Application processing time down from 5.5 to 3.5 days on average

The most immediate win for BayWa was speed. Prepaid applications that used to take over 7 days on average are now taking around 3. The team estimates they're cutting a minimum of 48 hours off the average application—and in a fast growing distribution business, a quick onboarding process results in customers’ needs being met sooner, which then correspondingly improves revenue growth.

 “I would say the biggest value that Nuvo brought to me personally is the time that is being saved in the onboarding process,” Sonya says. “I’ve been doing this type of work for a very long time, and the comfort is in knowing the information has been validated, it’s secure, and is in one space.”

10–20% growth and no need for additional headcount

Since onboarding Nuvo, BayWa has processed 600 applications through Nuvo, and they’ve also received a 10–20% increase in application volume. 

This is volume that, under the old process, would have required at least one part-time hire to manage. Instead, the existing team is handling more, faster, with less friction than ever before.

Increased fraud detection

The team reported one unexpected benefit of using Nuvo: They’ve seen a change in their ability to spot and stop fraud. Since implementing Nuvo, the team has caught five fraudulent applications that might have slipped through the cracks of a more manual process. 

48 hours/month back for the AR team

Before Nuvo, Sonya provided a laundry list of the kinds of application errors and manual tasks that took up the team’s time to mitigate, like: 

• Unauthorized signers
• Applications with the incorrect legal business name
• Wrong application type sent 
• Inactive COGS/TIN matching 
• Post-submission application editing
• Trade reference PDF wrangling

With these issues resolved, the AR team is gaining serious time back week-to-week. Sonya estimates they’re getting 10–12 hours back per week on the team. 

90% response rate for trade reference collection

Trade references, once a dreaded, manual, easy-to-skip step, have become a genuine competitive advantage. Response rates are close to 90%, and BayWa is increasingly finding that other solar industry suppliers on the Nuvo platform respond quickly and willingly in a way they never did over email. What was once an afterthought is now, as Sonya puts it, one of the most valuable parts of the process.

“If Nuvo got ripped out tomorrow, I’d probably cry.” —Jena Brewer, AR Staff Acountant

For William, the CFO, the value of Nuvo has been clear. “My philosophy is that you can get 75% of what you’re doing done with a software package—you’ll never get 100%. But I think in this case, we’ve actually gotten a lot more than what we wanted or expected from the start. We’re past 100% of what Sonya’s team wanted when we were considering the design of our own software program. Nuvo keeps working with us to evolve the process even further.” 

And for Jena, who is most in the weeds of the day-to-day, the value isn’t hard to put into words. When asked what would happen if Nuvo disappeared tomorrow, she said: “I’d probably cry.”