Quote Itemization

Every solar Quote in Jigawatt Fusion includes two values that affect all the other numbers: Sales Price and Redline. These are your total income and total expense on a Project, respectively, and the difference between them is your net income or profitability. So getting these values right is pretty important if you like making money.

Sometimes gauging profit really is as simple as "If I sell it for $3.00/W and my Redline is $2.30/W, I'll make some decent money." If your offerings are basic and your expenses are that cut and dry, you can just plug in a couple of quick values to your Quote and be on your way! You can set a per-watt rate that factors in the Layout's wattage, or key in a total dollar amount for your Sales Price and Redline.

But the adders!

However, most projects have adders–extra things above and beyond a standard PV system–that you as the sales person need to account for. Some folks might want premium solar panels. Maybe there's an extra-steep roof that will require more time and effort from your installers. Sometimes a main service panel needs to be brought up to code. If you're one of those detail people, you may want to itemize practically every aspect of a project, pricing out the panels, inverter(s), racking, electrical materials, engineering, permits, labor, and beyond. Income and expense can get downright complicated, and while you could keep track of that stuff in your head, it's a whole lot easier to do it in Jigawatt Fusion's Quote Itemizer!

Activate your Quote's itemized layer

Quote Itemization adds a juicy foundation of detail beneath your Sales Price and Redline. Activate your Quote Itemization by clicking the list icon next to Sales Price or Redline. This opens a whole new drawer where you plunk down line items to your heart's content. Jigawatt Fusion adds them up for you, and the sums get fed back to their parent values, Sales Price and Redline. Itemization can be edited and fine tuned, even disabled if you want to revert to flat-rate pricing, whenever you want.

Adding line items

You can proceed to add as many line items as you please, both from your Materials Catalog, and one-off Custom Items.

Catalog Item

Most of the time when you itemize, you'll be adding items that you've sold before and will probably sell again. Whether these are physical products like inverters and batteries, or turnkey services like trenching or a service panel upgrade, you'll want to have product attributes–and pricing–configured in your Materials Catalog. Basically, everything you routinely offer should be a Catalog item.

To add a line item from the Catalog:

Click Add from Catalog

Locate the item

Key in the quantity

Hit Add

You've created a Line item! You can now set the pricing, or edit the Line Item by clicking the Edit (pencil) button. This is where you'd swap for another Catalog item, update the quantity, or set an energy efficiency value (this is explained here in a few).

Custom Item

From time to time, you might have to get creative when building out a Quote. Maybe the customer wants you to trim some trees to cut back on shade. Maybe you're baking in a turnkey re-roof to your project, or they want some off-the-wall warranty you don't typically offer. You can add off-the-cuff line items to your Quote by clicking Add Custom Item, and giving it a category (typically Misc.) and name.

Parts of Line Items

Custom and Catalog items come from different places and have slightly different attributes, but they're treated the same on the Quote Itemizer. They have most of their values in common:

Quantity is pretty self-explanatory.

Pricing comprises both a Sales Price (your income, which sums into the Quote's total Sales Price) and Buy Cost (your expense, which sums into Redline), and can be calculated by Unit (the quantity you just set), by Watt (inherited from the system's wattage determined in the Layout), or as a Total value. Just click the box you want to calculate by and plug in a value–the other boxes will figure themselves out! Catalog Items will inherit your default pricing if it's been configured in your Company's Materials Catalog.

Efficiency is a unique metric that assesses your customer's energy demand, rather than the PV system's productivity, in forecasting on the Proposal. It's arbitrary, and barring a thorough and highly-scientific study, is a good-faith estimate at best. Efficiency won't apply to most solar Line Items, but would be appropriate if you're including insulation, LED retrofitting, an AC soft starter, window replacement, or any of a slew of improvements targeted at reducing the home's energy demand. Efficiency from all Line Items is summed, then deducted from the Meter's usage value as a percentage of total energy demand. Your Efficiency projection shows up on your Proposal. As with your production projections, do yourself a favor and set realistic efficiency expectations with your customers!

Itemization offers endless detail!

"Endless detail" may not sound all that fun to many users, but don't worry, Jigawatt Fusion doesn't demand detail; it offers the potential for any amount of Itemization. You get to use it however you want! Only a certain type of person is going to want to keep track of so many line items. But if you happen to be that type, we're proud to enable your AR behavior. So take a gander at this example of extreme itemization and let your imagination wander!

Hide pricing by collapsing line items

In the event you want to obscure pricing from the Itemization drawer, or your penchant for detail results in too many line items to gracefully sort, click the $ button at the top of the drawer to hide prices (click it a gain to show them).

Break it Down or Add it Up

Whether your business model works by breaking down adders as line items or as additional items/services on top of your base price, Jigawatt Fusion has you covered. There's a toggle between a + and an = symbol: + will add to your base price, and = will sum up your adders to create a total price.

If you're adding your adders, click on the +, which will let you set a base value for your per-watt or total sale price and redline and then add items and services on top of that. For example, if your price is set at $12,000, and you add a battery for $2,000, the total will be $14,000. This also works if you want to include subtractions from your total (no sale price with a buy cost greater than $0), which can occur if you include overhead costs, if you outsource your project to an installer that will charge you as opposed to the customer, or if you offer discounts you want to be shown on the quote.

If you want to use itemization to create your total, toggle over to the = symbol. With this method, you will not enter a base starting price, but instead will enter your individual materials and services, which will then be summed up for you to create your total price. This comes in handy if you don't have a "base package" of panels + inverters + required miscellanea to install solar, if you're specific and want to get granular with your pricing, or if you have a customer that insists on seeing the price of everything that's going into their installation.