Financial Task
This guide applies to the easy-pv.co.uk and beta.easy-pv.ie versions of Easy PV, references to MCS only apply to the UK site. The information provided here may not be accurate for easy-pv.com and easy.pv.ie.
Completing the Easy PV Financial task is an important part of designing and selling a PV system. The task has two main areas of focus:
- It helps you create an accurate quotation to give to the customer. You can fully cost the materials and services that will be included as part of the installation and set the relevant tax to be applied. It even allows you to apply relevant grants or apply discounts if you want to give the customers money off the installation. Using the Financial task and the Customer Proposal task, you can configure how you want the quote to be presented in the final customer proposal document.
- It helps you prepare estimated financial projections for the installed system over time. This is important as it will help the customer understand if they are making a good investment by showing likely costs and benefits and how long it might take for the system to break even. You can also include loans, running costs and other custom savings.
Getting started with the financial task
If you haven't already done so, we recommend setting up automatic pricing rules and financial defaults via your account preferences. For Pro teams, these defaults will be configured by the team owner or admins via Pro Account Settings > Financial. This will speed up the time it takes for you to generate an accurate quotation and projections for your project.
You can access the financial task via the 'Tasks' drop-down menu or from the task list to the left on project overview page.
When the financial task first opens, you'll be shown a popup that lets you configure the settings you want to use for the quote and projections. It will open on 'Self-consumption' and then you can use the right hand navigation to choose the settings you want to edit:
If you have set defaults via your account preferences, these will be automatically applied here. More information on each of the settings is available below.
When you have finished updating the settings, click Save & Exit. This will close the settings popup and allow you to view and modify the quotation, or click to view the projections.
Navigating the financial task
The right hand sidebar contains options to switch between the quotation and the projection view:
as well as the following actions:
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Update the financial settings |
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Refresh the financial task to reflect any changes you've made to the project via other tasks |
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View all options, including exporting the quotation as a CSV |
Quotation view
In the quotations view, you can view and edit the quotation under the following headings:
- Goods: Here you can see the full kit list and add or delete any items. To the right is the option to display or hide the markup and edit the quote view.
- Services: If using automatic pricing, you will see your service totals and can then make any adjustment. If not using automatic pricing, you can add your services costs here.
- Total: Finally, you will be able to see the total cost of the system for the customer, including any grants or discounts applied via the financial settings you've applied to the project.
Projections view
At the top of this page you will see the annual generation, payback period, internal rate of return and net present value. A positive net present value is a good indication that the project is financially worthwhile. You will also see the following options:
- Income and savings: This graph shows the projected income from the system over the project lifetime in payments for generated and exported electricity, along with electricity savings.
- Running costs: If running cost or loan is included then this will show up in this graph.
- Bottom line: This graph will then indicate the cumulative costs and benefits of the system. When these two lines intersect is when the system benefits become equal to the cumulative costs, after this time the customer is projected to gain from their solar system.
More information about configuring the financial settings
The following sections explain all the settings you can configure. Click to expand each section and read more.
Self-consumption
The proportion of electricity generated from a solar array that is used in a property can significantly affect financial returns. Easy PV has several different methods you can use to calculate self-consumption which you can select from here:
- MCS: this can only be used with flat tariffs and properties with annual consumption between 1500 - 6000 kWh.
- Easy PV: this can be used for a project of any size and can be used with variable tariffs. Information on setting up variable tariffs can be found in our tariffs guide.
- Custom percentage: this contains significantly less information than the above methods. When using a custom percentage the 'Battery Storage' section in the Customer Proposal will not generate. If you would like this to generate, select the MCS or Easy PV self-consumption.
Pricing calculation
Here you can select which pricing calculation to use, with the option of selecting a default markup on goods or using Easy PV's pricing settings functionality which allows installation prices to be calculated according to rules that you set.
Guidance on how to set up your own automatic pricing settings can be found in the automatic pricing guide.
Financial settings
Here you can adjust the following settings:
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Projection term: The number of years you wish to make financial projections. This should be approximately the expected lifespan of the equipment.
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Inflation rate: this is the Inflation rate for your financial projection. (Note: the Bank of England target rate is 2%).
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Panel degradation rate: panels gradually reduce in output as they degrade over time. Set the rate at which the output of the panels decreases each year.
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Discount rate: a discount rate is a means of determining the current value of something (like income or savings from a PV system) that you'll receive in the future.
Tax settings
In this section, the tax rate for materials and services can be adjusted and you can select whether the customer can reclaim the tax. Business customers can usually reclaim tax paid on an installation, but domestic customers typically can't reclaim tax. Tax rates may be different for domestic and business customers.
Running costs
Add rows for costs you expect to be incurred in the future. You can choose whether costs are applied on an annual basis (for example a maintenance contract) or as one-off costs (for example an inverter replacement).
Additional savings
Add rows for additional savings, such as from immersion diversion systems or from night charging from batteries.
Loan
If your customer wishes to pay for the equipment using a loan, you can model this here.
Select the loan amount and term. Then you can choose fixed repayments, where the same amount is paid regularly, or capital plus interest, where in an addition to a fixed repayment an additional amount is added to payments to cover interest accrued. You can set an interest rate on the loan itself, which can compound either monthly or annually. This will usually be higher than inflation.
Grant
If the project is eligible for a grant that will pay for some or all of the cost of the system, you can add it here.
Discount
If you want to apply a discount to your quote to reduce the cost for your customer, you can do so here. Input a description and choose the type of discount you want to apply. This can be a fixed discount or a percentage of the total cost.
Quotation CSV settings
If you wish to export the quotation as a CSV, here you can customise what will appear including the quotation date, reference, text and the customer address.