GreenHearth uses Zoho Analytics to power interactive financial modeling for energy transition finance

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    Consolidates data from 30+ partners
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    Over £50 million worth of projects analyzed through Zoho Analytics

"We’re a slightly unusual use case for Analytics because it’s not being used internally to help with internal working. We’re much more externally focused. Zoho Analytics is part of the core customer proposition. It’s how we tell the story, both visually and interactively."

Richard
Co-founder and CEO, GreenHearth

The company

GreenHearth is a UK-based energy transition finance company that helps small and medium-sized enterprises finance and understand the economics of renewable energy assets, including solar panels, battery energy storage systems, air source heat pumps, voltage optimizers, and water recycling equipment. Co-founded by CEO Richard Bartlett, whose background spans 25 years in the UK finance industry, GreenHearth was created to deliver sophisticated financial expertise to the SME market. This segment is typically too small to maintain in-house financial analysis teams.

The company brings together expertise in finance, technology, law, and renewable energy and positions itself at the intersection of two industries: translating renewables for the finance sector and translating finance for the renewable sector.

Since launch, GreenHearth has analyzed over £50 million worth of projects through Zoho Analytics, with that analysis laying the foundation for the arrangement of more than £6.5 million in actual financing. The business has been growing at over 100% year-on-year.

The challenge

GreenHearth’s clients—SMEs contemplating investments in solar and other energy transition assets—face a fundamental information problem. Projects typically range from £100,000 to £500,000 in value and span 15 to 25 years, but the businesses making these decisions lack the in-house financial analysis capability to evaluate them rigorously. They need to understand the returns, model the cash flows, and explore how different variables affect the outcome. However, without expert support, they can't.

GreenHearth identified this gap and decided to build a solution that was simple to deliver, capable of running reasonably sophisticated financial modeling quickly, and presented in a way that customers could understand and interact with directly. The goal was to allow clients to explore the numbers themselves by adjusting key inputs and seeing in real time how those changes affected their returns.

The team initially tried MS Excel to understand how to model solar schemes, but it proved to be inadequate as a client-facing delivery tool. The company then developed its own proprietary code to run the core analysis, and they needed a platform that could serve as both a recalculation engine and a delivery layer. It also needed to be capable of rendering complex financial models in a visually clear, interactive format that could be shared externally with customers and lenders.

The solution

GreenHearth selected Zoho Analytics as the delivery engine and recalculation layer for its financial models and has used it since the first six months of operation. The architecture is straightforward: when a customer is considering installing a solar system, GreenHearth receives hourly production and consumption data for the proposed site (typically around 9,000 rows covering a full year) from the installer the customer is working with. This data is first pulled into GreenHearth’s own proprietary software, which standardizes and validates inputs from the 30 to 40 different installer partners the company works with, each using slightly different design tools and data formats.

The standardized data is exported as a CSV and imported into Zoho Analytics, where GreenHearth runs an energy balance model and builds an economic model on top of it. Key inputs (such as inflation rates, energy tariffs, and system design parameters) are exposed through filters and sliders on the dashboards, allowing customers to recalculate the model in real time.

A typical customer presentation includes between five and ten dashboards covering different aspects of the analysis. These include a direct comparison of funding options (self-funded, asset finance, and power purchase agreements), dashboards showing hourly and monthly energy consumption patterns, an energy balance across the year, and detailed 30-year cash flow models for each financing option. Public dashboard links are stored in HubSpot and associated with the relevant project and customer record.

GreenHearth uses Zoho Analytics to power interactive financial modeling for energy transition finance

"The cost–usability balance on Zoho Analytics was definitely the best. The extensive API, the flexible underlying structure to the analytics engine, and the ability to output and share dashboards publicly were the key things that set it apart."

- Richard Bartlett
Co-founder and CEO, GreenHearth

The dashboards are used both in live customer presentations (typically walked through via screen share once or twice a day by a member of the GreenHearth team) and embedded in formal reports presented to banks and other potential lenders when GreenHearth is helping a customer raise financing. Zoho Analytics is used on an almost daily basis, with the team currently analyzing somewhere between £500,000 and £1 million worth of schemes each week across one to six projects.

Benefits and ROI

Zoho Analytics has been central to GreenHearth’s growth since inception. Because the platform helps the core customer proposition rather than functioning as an internal reporting tool, its impact is measured directly in the scale of the business. In 2024, GreenHearth analyzed approximately £7 million worth of projects through the platform. By 2025, that figure had grown to around £23 million. In the first half of 2026 alone, the team had already analyzed approximately £20 million worth of schemes. This trajectory is consistent with the company’s sustained year-on-year growth of over 100%.

Adopting Zoho Analytics early also influenced how GreenHearth thinks about data architecture more broadly. The discipline of working within a structured platform rather than building on spreadsheets forced the team to think rigorously about what data to capture and how to model it. Much of the analytical work done within Zoho has data structures similar to those used in the company’s own proprietary software development, creating consistency across the business that would have been harder to achieve with a more fragmented tool set.

For customers and lenders, the interactive nature of the dashboards has proven particularly compelling. The ability to adjust variables such as inflation rates, energy tariffs, or system size and see the impact on cash flows in real time gives clients a genuine understanding of their investment. It also serves to build confidence in the analysis. Both solar installers and their end customers consistently rate the platform as a powerful and accessible tool for making the case for energy transition investment.

Looking forward

GreenHearth expects its use of Zoho Analytics to continue scaling in line with the business. The team is actively exploring how to extend the breadth of its analysis while keeping the outputs clear and accessible for customers who aren't financial specialists. The core use case is well established and effective; the focus now is on depth and efficiency.

The area of greatest planned development is deeper use of the Zoho Analytics API, allowing other parts of GreenHearth’s software stack to interact with the platform directly. The longer-term goal is to automate more of the workflow around workspace creation and model generation, reducing the degree of manual interaction required for each new project and allowing the team to scale its analytical output without proportional increases in effort.