Solution Pricing - Gross Price Input Method
Pricing your customer solutions properly is one of the most important aspects of operating a profitable contracting business. SolarNexus provides two basic approaches for pricing your solutions:
- Gross Price Input
- Cost Items
This article covers Gross Price Input. See Solution Pricing - Cost Item Method for details on that approach.
Gross Price Input
Use the gross price input option when your pricing model is external to SolarNexus. You'll use this option when you start using SolarNexus because you haven't yet created a Cost Item pricing model.
- Benefits: Simple to start using, leverage existing price model
- Drawbacks: Lack control over pricing input by employees, lack control over employee discounting, sacrifice granularity of reporting data, more overhead involved with maintaining your customer pricing (for example, you need to provide employees with updated pricing resources, such as spreadsheet/pricing matrix/etc)
The graphic below shows the breakdown of price components for a sample project using the gross price input method (dollar amounts and percentages are just representative).
Discounts - Gross Price Input
Discounts may be applied to gross price input amounts. A user may apply a predefined standard discount (for example, $250 discount for yard sign), or may manually enter a discount of any amount. Since the gross price input method does not distinguish the breakdown of the entered price, the system cannot limit the discounts applied by any user in any way, causing one of the drawbacks to using gross price input method for pricing.
Loan Fees (and "Cash Discounts")
Loan / dealer fees charged by finance companies are separate elements. See About Loan / Dealer Fees for more information. The notion of "cash discounts" is also discussed.