About Service Offerings

A Service Offering is a definition of a service that your company provides to its clients. Examples may include:

• Roof-mount PV System
• Ground-mount PV System
• Main Electric Service Panel Replacement
• EV Charging Stations, or EVSE (electric vehicle supply equipment)
• Energy Storage Systems
• Water Heater Upgrades
• Radiant Barrier Installation
• Duct Sealing
• etc

You can define a list of your company's service offerings in SolarNexus to enable your salespeople to easily include those services in customer solutions.

A service offering comprises a definition of a scope of work, including a description and list of major equipment/labor items, estimated energy savings (if an EE measure), and the price for the scope of work.

For each major equipment item, you can specify the list of available product options to choose from when quoting the service. And for pricing, you can specify the default gross price to use for the service when building a solution with simple pricing, and a set of cost items to use when building a solution with cost item pricing.

Here are some examples of service offerings:

When adding services to a customer solution, you can select from your company's pre-defined service offerings to use as the basis for defining the services in the solution. Here are examples of customer solutions created using the three service offerings above, one using cost item pricing, the other using gross pricing.

While it's possible to add ad-hoc services to a solution without using pre-defined service offerings, by pre-defining your most commonly quoted services you can:

• Streamline the process of adding services to a proposal -- users can simply choose from a list of your pre-defined offerings.
• Ensure consistency in your quotes -- avoid variations from user to user in how they build proposals.
• Use Cost Item Pricing -- ensure your proposals are consistently and correctly priced to ensure profitability.

Service Offering Best practices:

1. Start with a generic offering, list the categories of the main product items that go with the service. For example:
   • PV System: PV module, Inverter(s), DC Optimizers (optional), Monitoring, Mounting Structure
   • Main Service Panel Replacement: Service Panel, ????
2. If you find that the different manufacturer’s systems that you provide for a service offering has its own architecture and different kinds of required main equipment items, that indicates that it should be its own service offering. Or if the different item categories have equipment that must match another item’s equipment, that is another indication that this should be its own service offering. For example, ESS may have multiple components that are required to go with the main battery unit
3. If using cost items, and the set of cost items must vary between two instances of a category’s service, then that argues for two separate service offerings  

For RMA replacement case: a) is it critical to know whether RMA, Co. warranty, or new cust to pay when viewing list of work orders on Installs screen? I assume "No." Meaning service type can be more generic ("Inverter Replacement" vs "RMA Inverter Replacement". The services can then be "RMA Inverter Replacement" or "Warranty Inverter Replacement". The milestones can be tied to a custom field that defines if this is an RMA case, company warranty, or customer paid replacement case. This allows process milestones to be simpler and to just have steps that are unique to each different process (this is a best practice, define separate milestones for unique process steps - segregate process steps used in sub-cases).

Defining Service Offerings 

You can define your company's service offerings under Resources > Service Offerings. See the Create and Manage Service Offerings help article for details.

Using Service Offerings

Below is a screenshot showing a new customer solution. Notice the buttons at the top to add services (PV System, Storage, Efficiency Measure, Other) to the solution.

Upon clicking the Add Other Service button, for example, the user is given a menu of service offerings to select from:'

Read more about adding services to solutions in the Adding Services to a Solution help article. 

Service Offerings vs Solution Templates

If you’re already familiar with solution templates, you can think of a service offering as a sort of mini-template for an individual component that you can mix and match with other components when defining a solution. A service offering is an individual system or upgrade that is independent from other service offerings (for example, a grid-tie pv system, a MSP upgrade, an energy storage system). A solution template puts together service offerings that go together, simply for the simplicity of "pre-packaging" them. Solution templates are useful for creating branded packages of offerings, such as "Gold, Silver, or Bronze" packages, each with a slightly different set of service offerings included.

Before December 2018, Solution Templates were how you defined your PV pricing structure and pre-defined EE measures. After December 2018, you create individual Service Offerings to define the pricing structure, description and equipment options for each service you offer, and solution templates are simply pre-defined bundles of service offerings.

Your existing "legacy" solution templates created before December 2018 will continue to work as before, and you can continue to edit them, but any solution templates created after December 2018 will work the new way.

See the Create a Solution Template article for more details.

See the How to Migrate from Legacy Solution Templates to Service Offerings article for specific instructions on how to transition to the new approach.