There are three ways to add products to your Company Catalog:

1. Add products from the Public Catalog
2. Copy one or more SolarNexus defined service offerings into your account
3. Create your own custom products

 

Copy SolarNexus Defined Service Offerings

SolarNexus pre-defines a number of commonly used service offerings that can be copied into your Company's account from the Service Offerings screen. See the Creating and Managing Service Offerings for more about this. If you will use cost item pricing, you will want to review the default unit costs pre-populated into the cost items copied to your account. SolarNexus provides a Google worksheet that you can use to calculate unit costs for these product items, and you can edit/input your own unit cost rates (as described below).

 

Create Your Own Custom Products

Another option for adding products to your Company Catalog is by custom creating them. Custom created products support your own customized solution pricing using SolarNexus cost items. A custom product can be a labor or material item. A product can be as fine grained (e.g. a lag bolt) or as coarse grained (e.g. total installation labor) as your company desires.

TIP: Define labor products at a granularity suitable for crews to be able to accurately record their time spent doing each. For example: array layout and anchors, racking and module placement, home run wiring, inverter, interconnection. Crew members can simply record a start time for each activity. 

You define a custom product by clicking the Create Product button at the top left of any product category screen in the Company Catalog except PV and Storage equipment categories (See About Products and Catalogs for more).

You can also create products by importing them from a Comma Separated Value (CSV) file. This is particularly useful for initially populating your catalog from a spreadsheet. See Company Catalog Import / Export for details. 

NOTE: Companies that use SolarNexus' published solution templates, or use gross solution input as their price input method may not have any need to custom create products.

 

Editing Products

Regardless of the way in which a product is added to your Company Catalog, the individual product editor is the same. Screenshots of the company product editor are shown below:

The top section shows the basics about the product. In the screenshot above, the product was added from the Public Catalog. The product provider/manufacturer name and model number was defined by SolarNexus and cannot be edited.

The same top section for a custom created project is displayed below. Note that you can input your own values for Provider/Mfr and Name/Model Number.

Each product has the following properties:

• Provider (also known as a manufacturer). A product can be provided by your company or by another company.
• Product Name. The name or model number of the product or service/labor.
• Description.
• Cost Category. Cost categories provide a means to measure the relative contributions each category to the total cost of a project and can be used for reporting as well.
• "Active" checkbox. The "Active" checkbox allows the resource manager to temporarily disable a product so that the sales staff cannot use it in any new projects. This feature is handy when a product is temporarily unavailable.
• Units. You can specify the units on which the cost is based (each, per foot, per hour, per Watt (or kW) of system rating, etc.).
• Cost Structure. A product can have a standard or variable cost structure (more on Cost Structures below).
• Cost Shared Across Services. If checked, when product is included as a cost item in multiple services within a solution, this item's total cost will be distributed across each instance of this item in proportion to each service's portion of the solution cost.
• Base Cost Depends on Solution Scope. When checked SolarNexus will look for a match in the scope of work for the solution to the input scope-based cost instances. If found, SolarNexus will use the input cost amount for the cost item. If not found, it will use the default amount when solution scope does not contain a defined combination of scope values. 
• Company Cost. The cost that the company pays for the product. Note that for labor products, this should contain your company's cost to pay employees.
• Variable cost conditions, condition options, and cost additions (if Cost Structure = Variable Cost Product, see Product Cost Structures below)
• Suppliers and their catalog order numbers (optional, use if you wish to generate POs using SolarNexus).

You may also manage your product pricing edits using a single spreadsheet file that can be periodically imported into SolarNexus to update your Company Catalog. Details can be found in the Company Catalog Import / Export article.

SolarNexus provides a lot of flexibility in how you cost your projects, giving you the tools to control your own cost and pricing operation.

Product Cost Structures

SolarNexus provides two distinct ways to define the cost structure for each product, standard or variable. A product has a standard cost structure if it has a consistent unit cost. The cost of each module is an example of standard cost structure. A product has a variable cost structure if the company's cost varies based on one or more conditional values. Most products have standard cost structures, but there are many instances of labor products with variable cost structures.

 

Variable Cost Structure

Cost estimating can be challenging. To complicate the task, costs for essentially the same product can vary from project to project. For example, in the case of materials, the cost of modules might vary based on quantity. In the case of labor, the cost to rack modules probably varies based on roof height, material, and pitch. Each of these conditions has multiple possible options, making a large number of possible permutations.

Other quoting tools attempt to address this issue using "adders." An adder is really just a standard cost product defined to add cost to account for some site condition. For example, "add $100 to the cost of the job if the roof is two stories high instead of one". In this model, the roof height is the condition, and the option is two stories. What if the roof height is three stories? That must be another adder. What about the roof's pitch and roofing material? Adders make accurate costing difficult for several reasons. One significant drawback is that it depends on the user to search through long lists of possible cost adders to make sure they include the correct set of cost components on any given estimate. Managing large numbers of adders also presents administrative headaches for resource managers, but without a sufficient set of them, your cost estimates can be significantly inaccurate.

SolarNexus provides the option of defining a product using a variable cost structure to account for cost variabilities within the same product. Below is a screenshot of the editor for a variable cost product. The product example shows costs for module racking installation labor, with added costs based on surface type, roof pitch, and roof height.

Each condition is an independent unit cost adder. Each condition can add a percentage or dollar amount to the base company cost. One of the options corresponds to the base company cost, so it has a zero added amount. When a user adds one of these products to a project's cost items list, the user is prompted to select the appropriate option for each defined condition. In this way, SolarNexus automatically ensures that appropriate amounts are added to the unit cost for the product.

To illustrate, let's say that the above product is on a solution's cost item list. When edited, SolarNexus prompts the user to enter the correct values for the roof's height, surface type, and pitch from each of the available options. These values are then displayed on the Cost Items list. In our example, the project has a concrete tile roof, 4 in 12 pitch, and is two stories high. SolarNexus will calculate the Company unit cost as follows:

• Company unit cost = $800 base company cost + (20% * 800) surface type adder + (15% * 800) slope adder + (5% * 800) height adder = $1,120 / kW total unit cost.

 

TIP: Resource managers should define the Company Cost as the simplest, cheapest case, then define conditional options to add amounts for more costly conditional options. Added amounts are relative to the Company Cost given for the product. For example, in the installation labor case above, the resource manager defined the base resource case as a comp shingle, flat to low slope, one story roof because those options have no costs added to the base Company Cost.

TIP: In cases where there is only a single condition, and there is no base company cost, define the Company Cost as $0 and input the full unit cost amount for each of the Condition 1 Options. For example, a supplier might vary module cost based on quantity. In this case, you can make the base cost $0, and Condition 1 = Quantity with the added amount in dollars. Each option for the Quantity condition can be a tier, with the per unit cost for that tier as the added dollar amount in each condition option. In a solution using this module, the salesperson would simply select the correct tier and the correct cost would be looked up from the Company Catalog. The base cost for the module can be $0 + $X, where X is the amount for the selected tier.

 

Shared Cost Items

Shared cost items are general project costs that apply to whatever services are included in a project's scope of work. Examples of shared cost items include:

• Site survey / Tech evaluation
• General project management
• Engineering design / planset development
• Permit acquisition
• Incentives administration
• Stand for AHJ inspection
• Vehicle and crew travel

Within the Company Catalog, and within any solution's price screen using cost items, shared cost items are designated by the pie icon preceding its name, as shown below, to indicate that its total cost (the pie) is shared among the services included in a solution.

A cost item becomes a Shared cost item once the "Cost Shared Across Services" checkbox is checked (see below). Furthermore, the total cost of each of these shared cost items can vary based on the scope of work in the solution by checking the "Base Cost Depends on Solution Scope." The portion of the editor below shows the UI for you to define the cost of the work based on the scope of work for a solution.

When pricing a solution using shared cost items, the user will access a single set of shared items on the Price screen. See Pricing a Solution for more information.

 

Automatically Populate Products from Published Solution Templates

Enterprise customers with the Master/Agency edition may create solution templates in their Master account and publish any one or more of those solution templates to their agency accounts. The products used in the services included within those solution templates will also be automatically populated into each agency account's Company Catalog where individual costs can be configured for each product for that agency.

See Solution Templates for more information.

 

NOTES:

• SolarNexus accounts existing prior to August 27, 2013 may be using individual item markups to account for indirect costs. In that case, the following properties are also included:

  • Standard Markup %. The markup covers your overhead and profit. Applying it to the Company Cost determines the end customer price.
  • Minimum Markup %. The smallest allowed markup for the product. If set lower than the Standard markup, it makes a window of possible markups between the minimum and the standard. The salesperson can adjust the markup when defining the cost estimate.
• In those cases, SolarNexus computes a Customer Unit Price by multiplying the Company unit cost by a given markup %. For example, if the markup is 20%, then Customer unit price = $1,120 * 1.2 = $1,344 / kW.