Costing from the bill of materials
Using the price book and BOM lines in system cost.
Reviewed
What this is for
What the system costs to build, as one number the cash flow can spend. A flat sum, a rate per watt and the priced bill are alternatives. A step that summed all three would double-count in silence. Take the cost from the bill of materials is a switch, not a fourth amount column.
The bill is priced against the firm's price book. A tariff is what the utility charges the customer. Mixing the two is how a quote gets a plausible total that is somebody else's arithmetic.
Steps
- Open Financials, then Steps. System cost is required (the include box is on and cannot be cleared). With the switch off, you type a rate per watt DC and an optional fixed amount.
- Tick Take the cost from the bill of materials. The rate and the lump hide. What remains is the design as wired, at the prices in the book. Lines with no price contribute nothing; the result says how many there were. A dash, never a free line.
- The book is Pricing under Team. Yours beats a shipped benchmark, and a team's catch-all beats a platform row that names the exact size. The unit is the whole meaning of the number: a per-watt figure typed as an each-price produces a plausible book and a system cost three orders of magnitude too large with correct arithmetic throughout.
- Press Save and compute. Net cost on the result is system cost minus incentives. An unpriced count travels beside the total on every reader.
Until the model has been computed, there is no system cost on it to read.
Tips and common mistakes
- Do not add the rate-per-watt figure on top of the bill. The switch replaces it.
- Prices are never converted between currencies. A mismatch against the model's currency contributes nothing and says so.
- Region-pack rows are indicative. Quote from Yours once you have buying prices. How this was modelled on the Results tab says when the cost came from the shipped benchmarks.
- No wiring, no bill. A design never wired, or one whose zone change dropped the wiring, contributes nothing and the result says so. If the array moved after the wiring was generated, the cost is the earlier array's bill and the result says that too. Generate wiring, then Save and compute.
- To check the book against what you have actually been charging, open Delivered rates from the pricing screen and press Compare against the book. It prices each design's own bill from the book and shows what each quote added to the parts, which is the gap the book cannot express: labour, delivery, mounting, certification and margin.