Build a commercial solar quote
Follow this through once and you will have a complete commercial solar quote: a roof laid out on the building, a package priced, tariffs applied, and a payback figure for the business that asked for it.
Commercial solar asks for more than a home installation does, because a business is making an investment decision. There are eleven sections rather than six, and the middle of the journey is about consumption, tariffs, and return rather than kit. The tool is one long page: sections unlock as you complete them and stay on screen, so you can scroll back to anything you have already answered.
This is the same tool your customer uses on your website. Working through it yourself is also the fastest way to see what they will be asked.
Before you start
- Have the site address to hand. Nothing happens until the quote has one.
- Have the site's annual electricity cost and consumption if the business has given them to you. If not, your account's default assumptions will fill the gaps.
- Commercial Solar Quotes must appear in your Instant Quotes list. If it does not, commercial solar is not switched on for your account.
- At least one hardware package needs to be assigned to the tool, or you will reach the packages section with nothing to choose.
Start with the address and the pin
Commercial solar is the one tool that asks for the site before the quote exists.
- Go to Sales Pipeline → Instant Quotes → Commercial Solar Quotes.
- Click + Create new commercial solar quote. You land on a page called New commercial solar quote.
- Type the address into Search for a UK address here and pick the site from the list of matches.
- A satellite view opens with a pin at its centre and the instruction to drag and move the map to place the pin over the property. Drag the map, not the pin.
- Click Continue.
The pin is worth a few seconds of care. Everything about the roof comes from it: which building the satellite imagery is fetched for, and where the roof you draw sits on the ground. On a business park with several similar units, the address alone will not always land on the right roof.
Clicking Continue creates the quote and opens it.
Get the pin right first time. You can change the address or move the pin later from Recipient, but doing so clears everything that was worked out from it: the roof design goes, and the sections from Usage Profile onwards are unlocked and need answering again. On a quote you have already built out, that is most of the work.
Find your way around
The sidebar on the right lists every section, with the quote's reference at the top and the price as it stands at the foot. Each entry summarises what you have answered — the sector, the annual bill, the panel count, the package — so it doubles as a check on the quote so far. Click any entry to jump to that section. The PDF button below produces a printable version, and commercial prices are shown ex VAT. On a narrow screen the sidebar becomes a bar across the top instead.
The names in the sidebar are shorter than the headings on the sections themselves — Roofs for Roof configuration, Tariffs for Tariff selection — but the order is the same.
Along the top sits the row of controls you get in every quote tool, and your customer does not.
Recipient links the quote to a contact and is also where you correct the address or the pin. Share gives you the quote's web address and the email templates for sending it. Both are covered in Quoting on a customer's behalf. Under that row, Last updated opens the Activity log for the quote.
Every section ends with a Next step button. Once you have clicked it the section shows Step complete, and if you go back and change something it offers Save changes instead. Nothing is lost if you stop part-way: the quote is saved as you go and waiting in your Instant Quotes list.
Usage Profile
The first question is what kind of business occupies the site. Nine sectors are offered, each with a chart of how a typical site in that sector uses electricity through the day, and examples of the buildings it covers.
Pick the closest match rather than an exact one. The choice does two things: it sets the shape of the site's demand across the day, which is what decides how much of the generation the business uses itself, and it seeds an annual consumption figure for the next section.
The season buttons — WINTER, SPRING, SUMMER, AUTUMN — redraw the charts, and the play button cycles through them. Weekday demand is the solid line, weekend the dashed one. This is worth showing a customer on a call: a site that shuts at weekends exports far more than one that runs seven days.
Click Next step.
Electricity Bill and Supply
This section anchors the whole savings case, so it is the one to get right.
Choose how you know the site's costs, using the UNIT RATE (KWH) and ANNUAL COST (£) tabs, then fill in what the business has told you:
- Typical Annual Cost or the unit rate in pence, depending on the tab
- Standing Charge, in pence per day
- Annual Consumption (kWh), seeded from the sector you chose
Under Your Current Electricity Supply, choose Single Phase, which the tool describes as most small businesses, or Three Phase for larger commercial sites. This decides which hardware you will be offered later: every package is marked as compatible with one supply or both, and incompatible ones are not shown. If the packages section later offers fewer than you expected, this is usually why.
The figures start from your account's defaults, so most quotes need a nudge rather than a rewrite. Defaults are set per account, alongside the rest of the tool's settings.
Clicking Next step here sets the tool working on the building: it fetches satellite imagery for the pin and prepares a roof design. Give it a few seconds before the next section appears.
Roof configuration
Now lay out the roof. Three ways of working are offered, chosen with the ADVANCED, STANDARD and APPROXIMATED buttons:
- ADVANCED — every tool: draw roof outlines and obstructions, drag vertices, set pitch and material per roof, and move individual panels. A new quote opens here for you.
- STANDARD — the same drawing tools with a shorter menu. This is what your customer works in.
- APPROXIMATED — no drawing at all. You enter a number of panels and the tool lays that many over the imagery. Quick for a rough figure, but the panels are not related to the shape of the building, so it is a poor basis for a quote you intend to send.
Draw the roof from the menu at the bottom of the map. Draw Roof puts you in drawing mode: click each corner of the roof plane in turn, then click the first corner again to finish. The panel in the top left tells you what the editor is waiting for at each point. Once a roof exists, Panel Actions offers Auto-fill panels to lay panels across it, Add Panel to place them one at a time, and Clear panels to start again; with more than one roof drawn, select the one you mean first. Draw Obstruction marks out anything panels must avoid — rooflights, plant, vents.
With a roof selected you can drag it to move it, nudge it with the arrow keys, and drag its handles to reshape it. The arrows in the top right of the map undo and redo.
Two controls repay knowing. Satellite images switches between the images available for the site, numbered 1 and 2; when one is out of date or badly shadowed, the other is often better. The buttons in the bottom right zoom, reset the view to fit what you have drawn, and open the editor full screen, which is where the drawing is far easier.
The dashed outline around the building is the property boundary that came with the address, not something you drew. On a business park it can be a few metres out from the imagery, or cover a yard as well as the unit. Draw against what you can see in the picture rather than lining your roof up with that outline.
Large flat commercial roofs are usually one plane with a shallow pitch, so a single roof outline often covers the whole array. Check the pitch and material once you have drawn it, as both feed the output figures.
Click Next step. The design goes to the server to be costed and yielded, which takes a moment.
Solar output
This is where the roof becomes a number.
Each roof you drew gets its own block: Annual output in kWh with the panel count and installed kWp, Roof details with the material, pitch and azimuth, and Yield data recording where the generation estimate came from. Where there are several roofs, each one's share of the total is shown as well. A note at the foot records which panel wattage the figures assume, taken from the package you go on to choose.
The material is worth a glance. A roof drawn on an industrial unit still starts from the account's default, which is usually a domestic one, and it feeds the output figures.
Below that, SOLAR FLUX animates a typical day in June, panel by panel, from unlit to peak. Press play, or drag the slider to hold it at a particular hour. A single flat plane lights up evenly, as the one above does; where it earns its keep is a roof with several pitches or something shading part of it, when you can show a customer exactly which panels are carrying the array.
Click Next step.
Tailored hardware packages
Above the packages sit two questions. Include battery? filters the list to Solar only or Solar & battery, or leaves it at No preference. Preferred usable battery capacity either takes the recommendation the tool has calculated from the site's consumption, or lets you set the capacity yourself with I'll choose.
Each card shows the kit, the year one saving, an estimated price and a monthly figure if you offer finance. Details opens the full specification, and View finance calculator breaks down the monthly cost.
Click Choose package on the one you want. That choice is what completes this section — there is no Next step button here.
Two things affect what you see. The list is filtered by the supply you chose under Electricity Bill and Supply, and the packages on offer, their order, and any discount applied to them are all configured per account.
Tariff selection
Import tariff decides what the business is assumed to pay for the electricity it no longer needs to buy. Keep my existing rate uses the figures you entered earlier. The alternatives are Octopus Energy for Business products, which use half-hourly regional rates for the site's postcode rather than a single average, and each card shows an indicative average and standing charge so you can see what you are switching to.
Export tariff does the same for the electricity the site sells back. Flat export rate uses a single rate you set in Export rate, which starts from your account's default. The Octopus export products vary through the day instead.
For a site that generates most at times it cannot use the energy, the export choice moves the numbers noticeably. Click Next step.
Savings
Nothing to fill in here. The section models the site's year with and without the system, using the usage profile, the bill figures, and the tariffs, and reports three numbers: Bill reduction, Export, and First year savings, which is the two added together.
Under them, Before solar and After solar show where the energy comes from and goes in each case, with WHOLE YEAR and MONTH-BY-MONTH views. After solar splits the generation into Solar self-consumption and Solar export to grid, as a figure and a percentage, which is the split a commercial buyer will want to interrogate: the higher the self-consumption, the better the case, because the site avoids buying at the import rate rather than selling at the export one. Show details next to each Detailed Breakdown opens the tables and charts behind the figures, and the note at the foot lists the assumptions used.
Click Next step.
Return on investment
For most commercial buyers this is the section that decides the job.
Finance options comes first: No finance prices the job as an outright purchase, and any finance products you offer appear alongside it with their rate. The choice changes the figures below.
Then four numbers — Total cost, Year 1 savings, Year 1 ROI, and Break-even year — and a chart of the net position over the projection period, with the break-even year marked on it and the total return stated underneath. Assumptions and inputs at the foot shows the savings inflation rate and the projection length behind that curve. Both are set per account, and the inflation rate compounds, so a long projection at an optimistic rate produces a very large number. Check them before you quote a thirty-year return to anybody.
Click Next step.
Add-ons
If your account offers extras that apply automatically to commercial solar, they appear next under Additional options available for your system, and you confirm them as you would any other section. If it does not, the quote goes straight to the summary.
Summary
The last section is headed Your C&I Solar quote, and it is the quote as your customer will read it: the kit, then the chosen package and any add-ons itemised with a price each, then what the price includes — MCS certification, the DNO application, electrical parts — and a What's not included? line they can expand with Show details. If you have a discount code, enter it in Enter promo code and click Apply.
The bar at the foot carries the three figures a buyer looks for: YEAR 1 SAVING, MONTHLY FROM if you offer finance, and ESTIMATED PRICE, quoted ex VAT.
Below the price sits your own call to action — contact details, terms, a signature, an appointment, or a deposit, depending on how the tool's acceptance is configured. You cannot accept on your customer's behalf; acceptance is switched off while you are working inside the quote, so they have to open the link themselves.
Send it to your customer
Click Recipient to link the quote to a contact, then Share to copy the web address or send it by email. Both are covered step by step in Quoting on a customer's behalf.
Check it worked
- Look down the sidebar. Every section has a summary line under it, and Summary is reachable.
- Open PDF in the sidebar and check the printable quote reads the way you would want it to arrive.
- Find the quote in Commercial Solar Quotes. It carries the Created by Admin tag, and Has Contact Info once you have set a recipient.
- Open the shared web address in a private browser window. That is exactly what your customer sees.
Related
- What your customer sees — the same eleven sections from their side
- Quoting on a customer's behalf — setting a recipient, sharing, and emailing a quote
- Find and follow up on instant quotes — working the list once the quote is out