What a hand-rebuilt solar quote actually costs

The solar quote is the only document a company produces before it has won anything. It is also the one it spends the most unbilled time on — and the only one where a mistake is legally binding, since a price given in writing is not renegotiable.

In most solar businesses it gets produced the same way: open the file from the last comparable job, save it under a new name, change what is different. The method has a genuine advantage — it is fast, and the formatting survives. Its cost spreads across four line items, only one of which is visible.

How long does a hand-built solar quote actually take?

A standard residential quote takes twenty to forty minutes once the source file is open. A commercial installation with several configurations to compare comfortably passes ninety minutes. Multiplied by monthly quote volume, and by the fact that it is done by someone senior, the total is significant — and still the smallest of the four.

It is nevertheless the only one companies mention when asked what their quoting process costs. The next three never come up, because they only show themselves after the fact.

Why do copy errors never get caught on review?

A duplicated quote already carries every value from the previous job. Changing "what is different" assumes you know exactly what is different — and the line you miss is always the one you did not think to look at: the mounting count that follows the panel count, the cable run matched to the distance to the board, the one-off discount granted to the previous customer and still sitting in the file.

These errors share one property: they are never caught on review. The document looks exactly as it should, because it was built on a document that was correct. They surface at the supplier order, or on the roof.

What happens when a quote goes out on stale prices?

The duplicated file carries the prices from the day it was created. On imported equipment, where cost depends on an exchange rate and a supplier list that both move, a quote built on a three-month-old base is priced against numbers that are simply wrong.

The gap never presents itself as an error: it presents itself as a job that turned out less profitable than expected. Nobody traces it back to a cause, because nothing suggests there was one.

The commercial consequence is worse than the loss itself. A company that cannot tell which jobs were priced off stale numbers also cannot tell which ones were genuinely profitable — and is therefore setting its pricing policy on figures it wrongly believes it knows.

Why is a quote’s real margin almost never checked?

This is the most expensive item, and it is entirely structural. In a spreadsheet built line by line, the quote’s real margin is not on screen while it is being written. You apply the usual coefficient and assume it holds.

It does not always hold. A closing discount applied to the total, a line thrown in to win the decision, a labour figure left over from a simpler job: each of those moves the margin without anyone seeing it at the moment it happens. The question "at what price does this job stop being profitable?" has no answer on screen, so it does not get asked.

What changes when the quote is built from stock?

The problem is not the spreadsheet as such: it is that the quote is disconnected from the data it depends on. It copies prices instead of reading them, and it knows nothing about stock, the deal, or the customer.

A quote generated from the product catalogue changes four things at once, and each one closes one of the items above:

• Prices are read at the moment the quote is produced, not copied from a file dated March.
• Recurring configurations — a standard residential fit, a kit with batteries — are saved once and recalled, instead of being reassembled from memory.
• Margin is calculated as you write, so a discount is decided knowing its effect rather than estimating it.
• The quote stays attached to the deal: when it is signed it becomes a job carrying its equipment and quantities, with no re-keying and no fresh chance to get it wrong.

The time saved is real, and it is the least important of the four. What matters is that a variant stops being a hand-rebuilt document and becomes a change of quantity — so there is no longer a version that can quietly fall behind the one before it.