In Jigawatt’s infancy, it had one objective: create accurate solar quotes using a centralized catalog. We had been using a dilapidated spreadsheet that was both limited in functionality and difficult to use. It was tough to train our sales reps how to use it properly, and generating quotes was our biggest bottleneck in making sales. When we did get signed contracts, our projects were hemorrhaging money due to our inaccurate quotes from the poorly configured spreadsheet.
Sound familiar?
Good news! We built something better. Much, much better. Quoting solar in Jigawatt is unbelievably thorough, crazy fast, and actually a whole lotta fun. You’ll be able to account for every dollar before you even pitch the customer by building your job costing right into your quotes.
Smart Product Catalog
Quotes in Jigawatt are powered by a database of the equipment your company carries. When configuring your account, we’ll help you set up your catalog with relevant metrics regarding your panels, inverters, optimizers, and other solar components. Jigawatt uses these values to quickly price a solar system and calculate its performance.
PV Solar System Designer
Satellite view
Dynamic address lookup uses the Google Maps API to pinpoint a rooftop and give you the satellite view to check for solar viability. Click off different roof planes to take approximate measurements for panel placement.
On-the-fly configuration
After you trace the areas available for solar arrays, you choose the physical materials that make up this solar system from your smart product catalog. As you adjust quantities and change products, Jigawatt automatically updates pricing and energy output.
Optional smart logic assists you in choosing compatible equipment and capacity.
PV Watts integration
Jigawatt sends panel wattage and count, roof slope, azimuth, and other variables to PV Watts via a background API, and returns NREL-validated production data for the system you’ve designed. This gives you monthly energy production estimates in seconds, and generates helpful charts, to help your clients’ economic forecasting.
Job Costing
Knowing what your costs will be on a project allows you to price competitively while keeping your company healthy. Jigawatt lets you control both hard costs and soft costs on a job-by-job basis.
Soft Costs (commission, overhead, markup)
Jigawatt’s quote income breakdown allows you to itemize and calculate the costs of doing business, and factor them into each job to help you understand your real profitability. The soft costs module gives you total control over things like sales rep commissions, project markup, cost overhead, and financing dealer fees.
Hard Costs (engineering, materials, labor)
Calculate hard costs, one-by-one, and aggregate them into accurate install budgets. You can save some time by loading every quote with a list of standard hard costs that you have for every job you quote. You can also manually add and deduct itemized costs on a per-quote basis.
Financing Options
A large portion of residential PV systems get financed. This opens up a wider market and helps more people go solar, but offering financing comes at a cost. Needless to say, the economics of a system change when it’s financed.
Jigawatt’s Loan Manager lets you plug in a diverse portfolio of loans you offer. Once configured, you can apply them to your quotes with a couple of clicks, and the system does the math for you, calculating effective monthly payments based on a range of variables. The Loan Manager also factors dealer fees into your soft costs, so you can know your true profitability on a job, and price accordingly for cash versus financed projects.
The Loan Manager is designed to give sales people the ability to accurately apply loans to their quotes without needing to understand the minutia of finance. Once properly configured, loan calculation and costing on a project-by-project basis is simple.