Administration - Project Settings

Default Customer Information

On creating a new lead, SolarNexus will pre-fill the following fields with your defaults, making the process faster:

• State - Input the state in which you do most of your projects.
• Type - Select the type of customer (and corresponding tax entity) you most frequently sell to. Residential customers type are "Individual" with their tax entity also being "Individual."
• Tax Entity - Use "Individual" if most of your customers are homeowners, otherwise pick the type of tax entity that matches the businesses or government type you selected above.

Energy Use Options

We strongly recommend using Billing Periods, or Green Button file (if your utility provides them). You can always make a different selection, but its important to be in the habit of getting good customer usage data on which to base PV system size, as well as to accurately evaluate economic returns.

Default Solution Templates

All solutions are created from a solution template. A solution template defines the pricing model that will be used for the solution you are defining, as well as other aspects of the solution. See Solution Templates and Pricing. You can specify a different default solution template for residential and commercial projects. SolarNexus is pre-loaded with a simple template called "Gross Price Input - Any Systems". Use this template until you can define cost items and a solution template that reflects your desired pricing model.

Default PV System Parameters

Set default values for default array locations, solar access for roof planes, installation types and module orientation, and default array setbacks. Everytime one of these entities is created, it will have the values you define here input as defaults. None of these values is required, here's more detail about some:

• Default Array Locations - This is an optional field, typically collected during qualification, for defining the desired areas for installing arrays. If a very high percentage of your business corresponds to certain type of installations, you can specify a default.
• Roof Face Setbacks - Roof face setbacks are distances that array layouts must be from the various types of roof edges. These values are assumed for all roof face arrays, and should definitely be entered here. Note that if changes are needed for a certain project in a jurisdiction with requirements that differ from the defaults, the default values can be changed for that particular project.

Default PV Output Parameters

The default PV Output parameters is where you define assumed system loss factors and weather data source. It reflects the loss parameters used by NREL's PVWatts software because SolarNexus uses PVWatts for its production estimates. Any of these values can be custom set on any particular project from the PV Output Modeling button on the PV System screen for a solution. Note that we have also added a new parameter called "PV Output Adjustment" as an increase percentage on the output modeling in case the PVWatts values do not adequately match the output generated by another tool.

Indirect Project Costs

See Indirect Costs and Discounts.

Default Project Analysis Parameters

You can set default values for the analysis parameters used in residential and commercial project analyses. These include incentives, project finance method, operations and maintenance cost assumptions and other parameters for both residential and commercial projects. If assumptions vary for most of your projects, you may not want to set any preference values, or only a subset of them. The Project Settings contain detailed settings for automatically populating incentives into your Solution Analyses to help users avoid manual work.

As with all project defaults any of the following default values can be modified for any project.

• Finance Method - If you routinely lead with one finance option, even if its "pay cash," select it here to make it pre-selected on your analysis screen.
• Customer Income Tax Rates - Many different analysis elements need customer income tax rates (such as secured loan payment deductions, utility bill deductions and depreciation for commercial entities, and a variety of incentives). We strongly recommend inputting assumed income tax rates because those fields are required for every analysis. There are many sources of this information available, such as this one. Pick a bracket (%) that is representative of a majority of your clients. Remember, it can be edited for each client.
• Incentives - Leave all the boxes for the incentive options checked (Installer Collects Rebate, Auto-Suggest PV Rebates).
• Operations & Maintenance - You can define how much future costs to assume for inverter replacements, as well as annual costs for cleaning and system checkups. All O & M costs are optional.
• Utility Bill Parameters - This is where you define the assumed annual escalation rate for energy rates, as well as providing an assumed rate for local utility taxes. Local utility taxes differ from city to city. In some very popular solar jurisdictions, our bill calculation partner automatically adds this tax. However, in many cases they do not. These tax rates are usually called user utility tax (UUT). We recommend generating a solution analysis without inputting any local utility tax rate and then viewing the Utility Bills tab and looking at the detailed breakdown. If taxes are shown, then the rates are available for your jurisdiction. If not, we strongly recommend reviewing utility bills from your most common customer cities, and then inputting an average utility tax rate for the jurisdictions in which you work.  
• Analysis Period Parameters - This is where you input the analysis period and assumed discount rate used in calculating net present value and internal rates of return.
• Other Analysis Parameters - This includes assumed rate for evaluating increases to property values. Studies show that home buyers are willing to pay more for homes with solar and energy efficiency features. SolarNexus provides two separate methods of quantifying this increase in property value based on the two most well known studies. The most recent one, and the one we suggest using for PV system only sales describes the increase in property value as a function of a PV system's rated size in watts. This study and methodology can be found here: An Analysis of the Effects of Residential Photovoltaic Energy Systems on Home Sales Prices in California, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, April 2011. The second method is the value increase per annual energy dollar saved. That is, the property's value is anticipated to increase for every dollar in energy cost savings per annum. We suggest a default value of 20 ($20 increase in property value per annual dollar saved). The source of the default value is Evidence of Rational Market Valuations for Home Energy Efficiency, Appraisal Journal, Nevin/Watson, October 1998.

(See the Incentives discussion in the Analysis Parameters section for details on how these settings relate to the Analysis.)

Sales Docs

SolarNexus recommends using a consistent naming convention, such as date-solution-doc type-customer. For example, a proposal for solution A generated on June 12 might be "2013-06-11 Soln A proposal customer_last_name." You can create default naming formats for proposals, contracts and change orders. These formats can vary for residential vs. commercial jobs.

Docusign Settings

See Using Docusign Integration article.

Webhooks

Webhooks are a mechanism to send other software notifications of specific events happening in SolarNexus. For example, you can use them to integrate with third party applications using our Zapier application. See Integrating an Email Marketing Application with SolarNexus. 

Other Options

Includes attributes like:

• Whether Efficiency systems may be added to solutions
• Whether project log entries may be edited by users
• Whether the cost column is displayed on the Price screen (for cost item pricing)