G2

Havey D.

Senior Sustainability & Renewable Energy Project Manager

Renewables & Environment

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

11/6/2026

"All-in-One Project, Timesheet, and Invoicing Hub That Saves Us Hours Each Week"

4.5/5

What do you like best about Avaza?

What I like best about Avaza is how it bundles project planning, timesheet logging, expense tracking, and quote/invoicing all in one single workspace, which fits our renewable energy delivery model perfectly. At GreenHorizon Renewables UK, I run solar farm feasibility jobs, commercial building retrofits and wind turbine pre-construction assessments, and we juggle consultant engineers, survey crews, local council stakeholders, and our in-house commercial team all at once. Having these core functions unified in Avaza removes the constant switching between separate spreadsheets, project tools and accounting platforms that used to eat into my week.

The integrated timesheet and expense workflow is the feature I rely on every single day. Our site surveyors and design engineers log hours against individual work packages for each renewable scheme, and they attach receipts for site travel, equipment hire and third-party environmental reports directly inside their expense entries. The built-in approval routing lets me sign off on labour and costs without chasing people for separate email attachments. This structured submission and approval flow saves me roughly four hours each week that I previously spent reconciling loose expense forms and matching logged hours to project budgets in Excel. For example, on our recent rooftop solar retrofit for a local council building, I could instantly compare actual logged engineering time against our tendered budget, catching an overspend on ecological survey work early before it spiralled.

I also get huge value from its quote and estimate module, which is tailored for our long-cycle sustainability projects. We often need to build multi-phase proposals that separate feasibility assessment, planning submission, installation, and post-completion monitoring. I can build line-item quotes with grouped work stages, attach supporting carbon impact documentation, and send them straight to our client stakeholders for review. Once a quote gets approved, I convert it into a live project in just a couple of clicks, carrying across all the budget line items automatically. There’s no retyping scope details, which cuts down human error on our complex net-zero focused bids.

An unexpected benefit I found is how well the reporting tool supports our regulatory and net-zero reporting obligations. We need to track and report project spend, resource allocation and delivery progress for our UK environmental compliance reviews and grant-funded schemes. Avaza’s custom report builder lets me pull together consolidated data on labour hours, project expenditure and milestone delivery, which I feed into our quarterly sustainability governance reports. Before Avaza, compiling this grant reporting pack meant pulling data from three different systems, a process that used to take almost a full day for every major scheme.

The native Microsoft 365 integration also ties neatly into our existing stack. Our team syncs project files stored on SharePoint to relevant Avaza tasks, and automated alerts push milestone reminders into our Teams channels for key stakeholders, including local authority planning officers. It keeps everyone aligned, even on projects with long lead times and many external parties.

Avaza isn’t overloaded with gimmicky features we don’t need. For a mid-sized renewables firm delivering regulated, grant-backed sustainability work, the all-in-one structure keeps our costing, resourcing and project delivery connected. It helps me keep tight control of project budgets, stay on top of our grant reporting requirements, and reduce the administrative overhead that distracts our team from the core work of delivering carbon reduction projects. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Avaza?

There are several frustrating gaps within Avaza that create regular administrative and compliance friction for our renewable energy project delivery work, especially with the strict reporting and data governance rules we follow for UK net-zero and grant-funded schemes. The biggest pain point for me is the rigid, limited custom reporting engine, which falls short of the granular sustainability metrics we need to submit for our public funding bodies. We run solar and energy efficiency projects backed by government green grants, and our quarterly submissions require us to combine budget spend, engineering labour hours, milestone completion status, and forecast carbon savings all in one consolidated output. Avaza’s native reports cannot merge these different datasets together, and there is no way to save filtered, reusable report templates tailored to grant reporting. Every reporting cycle, I manually run three separate exports, clean them up, and combine them in Excel, which eats up roughly three hours per project and creates room for transcription errors. If a funding auditor asks for an ad-hoc breakdown, there is no quick way to pull the required view inside the platform itself.

The client portal permission controls are another major limitation. We regularly share project progress, survey reports and quote documentation with local council stakeholders, ecological consultants, and landowners, but Avaza’s portal access is all-or-nothing at the project level. I cannot create restricted views that let a landowner review only their site-specific documents without seeing our internal cost breakdowns, engineer notes, or sensitive tender pricing. This creates a GDPR risk, because we are forced to either expose commercially sensitive and personal data to external parties, or manually redact PDFs and send them separately via email. For example, on our recent wind feasibility assessment, we had to generate and send six separate sanitised document packs, rather than granting controlled portal access, adding hours of repetitive document editing work and breaking our single-source-of-truth workflow.

I also find the audit trail functionality too shallow for our compliance requirements. Avaza logs basic edits to timesheets and expense entries, but it does not track when external portal users view or download files containing resident or landowner personal data. Under UK data protection rules, we need to demonstrate a full record of access when we receive subject access requests. Right now, there is no log of who downloaded ecological survey reports or site contact sheets, so our governance team cannot verify data access activity without building separate offline tracking spreadsheets. This adds compliance overhead and creates risk if we cannot produce a complete trail during an audit.

The Zapier trigger reliability is inconsistent for our milestone alert automations. We set up workflows to notify our design team and external planning consultants when a planning submission task hits its deadline. The triggers sometimes fire late or fail silently, and there is no native debugging panel inside Avaza to diagnose why an automation didn’t run. On one solar retrofit project last quarter, a delayed alert meant we nearly missed our planning deadline, which would have risked losing our grant eligibility. Troubleshooting these failures means jumping between Zapier logs and raising support tickets, which can take multiple business days to resolve.

For improvements, my top priority would be expanded, multi-dimension custom reporting with saved templates and scheduled exports, built specifically to combine financial, timeline and custom sustainability fields. Next, granular client portal permissions, so I can limit external stakeholders to only selected folders and documents without opening up the full project dataset. A richer audit log that records file view and download events would also bring the platform fully aligned with our GDPR record keeping duties. Finally, better native logging for webhook and Zapier events would give us confidence in our automated deadline alerts for regulated renewable grant projects. These changes would turn Avaza from a solid time and budget tracker into a tool built for regulated sustainability and net-zero delivery teams like ours. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Avaza solving and how is that benefiting you?

Before adopting Avaza at GreenHorizon Renewables UK, our renewable project delivery was spread across disjointed systems: standalone quoting spreadsheets, a separate timesheet tool, SharePoint for site documents, and manual expense forms sent over email. We struggled to connect our tender quotes, logged engineering hours, site travel expenses and project budgets in one unified view, but now we can convert an approved quote directly into a live project with preloaded budget line items, which has resulted in us cutting bid-to-project setup time by roughly 65% for our solar retrofit and wind feasibility schemes. Before this workflow, every approved tender meant manually copying scope and pricing details into separate tracking sheets, which often introduced typos and mismatched budget figures that created headaches for our grant audits.

We struggled to spot budget overruns on grant-funded sustainability projects until weeks after the extra costs were incurred, but now our surveyors and design engineers log hours and attach site expenses against individual work packages inside each project, which has resulted in real-time budget alerts that flag overspend early. On our recent local council rooftop solar scheme, the system alerted me that our ecological survey spend was creeping above the tendered budget two weeks ahead of our usual monthly finance check-in. That gave us time to adjust our scope and negotiate with our subcontractor, rather than absorbing unplanned costs that would have eaten into our project margin and risked our grant compliance conditions. This visibility saves me approximately three hours weekly that I previously spent cross-referencing separate finance exports.

We struggled to pull clean, traceable spend data for our UK net-zero grant reporting, piecing together timesheet, expense and milestone data from three different platforms, but now all labour, travel and third-party supplier costs live attached to the same project record, which has resulted in a much simpler audit trail for our funding body reviews. While Avaza still lacks the fully custom combined sustainability reports I wish it had, the single source of project financial data means I no longer need to reconcile conflicting datasets from multiple tools. Compiling our quarterly grant submission pack now takes half the time it used to, and the audit trail is far easier for our governance team to validate under UK GDPR rules.

We also struggled with slow, error-prone invoicing tied to renewable project deliverables, where we had to manually match approved timesheets and receipted expenses to each milestone invoice, but now we pull pre-approved time and expenses straight into line-item invoices, which has resulted in fewer billing mistakes and faster payment turnaround from our council and commercial clients. Our team no longer loses billable site hours because logged work sits forgotten in a separate timesheet app.

Avaza is not perfect, with well-documented limitations around client portal permissions and advanced custom reporting. Even so, it solved our most pressing operational pain point: removing the silos between quoting, delivery, time tracking and expenses for our regulated renewable projects. It keeps our small delivery team focused on designing and delivering carbon reduction schemes instead of endless spreadsheet reconciliation, which is exactly the operational lift we needed to scale our net-zero project pipeline responsibly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.