Incentives
Selecting and ordering incentives on a financial model.
Reviewed
What this is for
Which rebates and allowances this model claims, and in what order. A percentage taken after an earlier incentive is worth less than one taken on the full cost. That is the reduced-basis rule, and it is why they are sent in library order rather than in the order you ticked the boxes.
The library is this team's list, on Tariffs, not a curated schedule. Empty here means the team has none, not that none apply.
Steps
- Open Financials, then Incentives. If the team has none: Your team has no incentives yet, with a link to the tariff library. New incentive lives there, on that team's list, unlike the curated rates.
- Once the library has rows, each is a checkbox plus a one-line summary: the amount (a percentage of the full cost or of the reduced basis, a rate per watt, a rate per kilowatt-hour, or a lump), and when it is paid (on installation, or in a named year). Tick the ones this model claims, then press Save and compute.
- Order is the library's, not the tick order. Ticking them in a different sequence does not change the award; changing an incentive's Order in the library does, from the model's next save. The cash flow shows the basis each one was actually taken on, the amount awarded, the year, and a Capped badge when the cap bound it. A retired incentive has no year and that cell is a dash - zero in that column means paid on installation.
- The Incentives step on Steps decides whether the ticks are claimed, the way every step's switch decides its own money. It starts off on a new model, and ticking an incentive here switches it on. Switched off, nothing ticked is counted: the Incentives tab says Not counted, the result shows a dash for incentives, and its notes say how many ticked incentives were left out.
Tips and common mistakes
- Do not type a rebate into the capital-cost amount to "include" it. That hides the basis and the cap, and a later incentive cannot see it.
- A percentage of the reduced basis is not a smaller percentage of the full cost. The cash-flow column is the proof.
- To see what the incentives are worth, switch the step off on Steps and compute: the ticks stay, and the difference in payback is their value. Switch it back on before generating a proposal.
- A dash for incentives means none were claimed; a zero means the step is on and what was ticked came to nothing. Leaving the step on with nothing ticked is how a model says it looked and none apply.