What's new? PVBid has joined our Predictive Pricing engine with the power of HelioScope, the industry’s best design & sales software. Cool! What does that mean? Fast, tailored, and accurate pricing. An indicative project can be created in under a minute. Use your...
As an estimator, there are several nuances to every solar system that are hard to pin down. That's where the art of estimating comes into play. These nuances range from wiring best practices to how much a subcontractor will really cost to racking for the specific...
As Solar Power International approached, travel was on my mind. Setting up travel plans led me to thinking about the day-to-day accounting of travel for solar contractors. Interestingly enough, travel has also come up with a majority of my Estimating as a Services...
Three months in and the solar coaster is starting to pick up. The 2017Q4 SEIA Market Insight Report came out in mid December and I picked it up again to review. There, in all its glory, was a chart that exemplifies the solar growth we see throughout the year....
Well, we’re a month into the new year! Here at PVBid, we’ve started the year off really well. Our Estimating Service has been a huge hit - we even have clients who are partnering with us as their only estimators. The software is developing in awesome ways and we’re...
It seems like every few years there is some new module crisis on this ride we call the Solarcoaster (think the current Suniva case, or the anti-dumping case from 2014, or sillicon shortage of 2005 and many more). The biggest challenge is how to handle selling to the...
Solar installers and EPCs are construction contractors. Yes, we have different specialties, but if you distill it down into existing categories, “construction contractors” generally fits the bill. Did you know that each state handles sales tax for contractors...
The PV industry is still growing at 20% each year and we added 1,000 new jobs each week in 2016. Now that more and more systems are constructed each day, accurate proposals are an absolute key to success. Putting in the right adders is crucial to getting your prices...
So you built a solar array. Nice work! Did you make a profit? As with any industry in construction, especially solar focused, profit is the biggest litmus test of success. Unfortunately, most solar installers don’t have a good handle on this. There is a lot of work...