The Quick Proposal
The first step of the builder is a four-part form that produces a priced proposal without anybody tracing a roof. It exists because that is the conversation at the door: a bill, a rough system, a number.
Its four parts sit across the top of the panel.
| Part | What it answers |
|---|---|
| Quick bid | Size a system from a bill before anyone traces a roof. |
| Customer & site | Who it is for, where it is, and what they actually use. |
| Price | The rate this job is sold at, and what that does to the customer's number. |
| Equipment | The modules, the inverters, and the way it gets paid for. |
You can leave the whole step and start drawing. It is optional, and skipping it never colours as outstanding work.
Quick bid — sizing from a bill
Enter the utility, the monthly bill and the offset you are aiming at, and the bid sizes a system against it.
Three ways to drive the same number. Usage and production are read-only — they come from the bill and from the modelled output — and the three figures you can set update one another:
- Change the panel count and the system size and the offset follow.
- Change the system size and the panel count follows. If the size does not land on a whole number of the chosen module, you are offered the module combinations that do make it, with the one you pick most often selected first.
- Type an offset — 110%, say — and the panels and the system size follow it.
While the figures are being recalculated the panel says so, rather than showing a stale number as though it were settled. Two reset buttons return you to a 100% offset or clear the sizing entirely.
The module is a picker, not a wattage. You choose the module you actually sell, from the equipment library, and the wattage comes with it.
The pricing preview
Alongside the sizing sits the customer-facing summary: the monthly solar bill, the term and APR, the net system cost and the 25-year savings, with the assumptions those rest on stated underneath.
Commission is behind a "Details" toggle, not on the face of it. A commission figure sitting in the open beside a monthly payment is a problem the moment a customer is looking at the same screen. Opened, it shows the band and splits the figure — to you and to the org — rather than one number that could mean either.
Customer & site
The form leads with the fields that matter and keeps the rest behind More info, so the common case is short.
Required to save: the customer's name, the address, the account number, the meter number, the service ID, and the rate schedule.
Address. Type it and the autocomplete completes it. It is not a separate lookup box — the address field is the lookup — and what it returns is already in the form the 2D design needs to pull up that roof.
Appointment. The same picker used by the meeting scheduler, so an appointment booked here is a real appointment rather than a note.
Main panel upgrade. A list of the common cases with the option to add your own.
Consumption. Enter twelve months by hand, or take the usage straight from the quick bid rather than retyping it.
Price
The price step turns a price per watt into the customer's number, and then shows what that price means for you.
Price per watt
Set the price per watt, or set the total price — updating the price rewrites the per-watt figure and vice versa. Changing the price is an override, and overrides are governed.
The price band
An org that sells solar sets a floor and a ceiling in the solar settings. The control shows the band you are quoting inside, and there are four possible states:
- Inside the band — nothing to do.
- Approved — an override was asked for and granted at this price.
- Needs approval — the panel says how far below the floor or over the cap you are, asks for a one-line reason ("competing bid, referral, difficult roof…"), and sends it. The design has to be saved first, because an approval attaches to something.
- Refused — the price is outside the band and you do not hold the grant.
Somebody with
solar.price_overridehas to raise it.
If no band is configured, nothing is checked and the panel says so rather than pretending the price was approved.
The customer's price
The breakdown runs down to a net price:
- cash price without adders, then adders,
- the down payment,
- the FTC — the federal tax credit, shown as a credit, never as a rebate,
- and the net price.
The FTC is not money in an envelope. It offsets tax owed, so a customer whose liability is smaller than the credit carries the remainder forward — and if it runs out of years, the rest is never received. The panel asks for their annual liability and how many years they may carry it, then reports what they will actually receive and what is never received. A rep who asks that question up front sells the same system with a number that holds in April.
Your position
Below the customer's price sits your own rate card, in whatever unit your org set it in. Only the bands are shown here — the full chart lives on its own page, so a customer looking over your shoulder never sees it.
If your org never set a rate card up, the panel says so plainly. That is a setting nobody filled in, not an error.
Equipment
Three sections, and one of them is about people rather than hardware.
Modules and Inverters come from the equipment library — the org's own catalogue plus the platform's curated list.
How it gets paid for is where the finance product is chosen. A straight loan, a PPA or lease, and an equity-taking program are three different things and are labelled as three different things.
Sharing this sale names anybody else on the deal. Adding a name needs nobody's permission — you are making a promise on your own behalf. Removing one is a request: the split stays live and paying until the other person answers it, because a one-sided removal turns a shared sale into a race to edit the record last.
Handing a sale to somebody else
Sharing splits a commission. Handing over moves the sale.
Pick the person, give a reason, and ask. They have to accept before anything moves, and the whole exchange is recorded — including a refusal. That is deliberate: a sale cannot be quietly parked on somebody else's number.
If they already hold a design for the same customer, you are told before you ask, and they are given a merge resolver to decide which version of the information to keep.
The proposal image
The proposal shows a picture of the roof, and that picture has to stop moving even though the design does not.
Draw the roof, then use Capture for the proposal on the design view. It freezes the drawing as it looks on screen, and the proposal keeps showing that roof afterwards. If the design changes so that the capture no longer matches — a different panel count, say — the panel marks the image stale so you can retake it deliberately.
Saving, reopening and clearing
Every design you save is listed under Saved designs and can be reopened. Drafts of the form live in your browser and cost nothing; the saved versions are the ones worth keeping.
Deleting retires a design rather than erasing it. A design may have been shown to a customer and may be attached to a quote — removing the row would leave that quote pointing at nothing and erase the fact a proposal was ever made. The button says retire because that is what it does.
Clear every other design for this address does the lot in one go when a job dies: the saved rows are retired and the browser's own drafts for that address are dropped with them, so nothing reappears the next time the tool is opened. The design you have open is spared.
See Overview for exactly when a draft becomes a save, and Proposal Data Keys for every figure on this step that a proposal template can place on a page.