Blog Articles
Road Tripping to SPI
Greetings solar friends! This week has been quite crazy. We are heading to Solar Power International! This marks the first time PVBid is exhibiting at SPI and we are thrilled to be there! Quick plug: if you’d like to meet up and chat about PVBid please feel free...
Person-Hours vs. Time-It-Takes in Solar Estimating
How much time does it take? Often the question an estimator finds themselves pondering. There is a whole world wrapped into that question. So today, we are going to unpack that. I actually pointed to this topic a little in my last solar estimating conversation...
Cost Codes: 8 Effective Strategies
Greetings fellow readers! Today marks episode 4 of my delving into cost codes series. This time we are going to talk about strategy. Cost coding can be a powerful tool, if used right. They can be a complete waste of time if not. Take a quick look back at my...
Job Costing Strategies: the Importance of Accounting Systems
Cost codes again! Last week I took a pause to talk about Intersolar. This week I want to talk about job costing strategies. Such strategies will be greatly impacted by the software your accounting team uses. Construction specific software like Masterbuilder tracks...
What You Missed at Intersolar 2016
It is now a week and a half past Intersolar 2016 North America and I’m finally catching up! What a show! We had a table in part of the Powerhouse Pavilion thanks to Powerhouse. More about that in a second. We also hit Solar Summer Fest, the Solar Battle of the...
Solar Cost Codes: Gotchas and Gains
Last week I found that a search for “what are cost codes,” turns up descriptions from a dozen different types of companies. So I felt it was time for me to highlight the solar specific aspects of cost codes. Before we dive deeply into solar cost codes, however,...
Cost Codes Demystified for the Solar Industry
DIf you do a search for “what are cost codes,” you’ll turn up descriptions from a dozen different companies ranging from accounting software (Oracle and Sage) to construction company blogs. So I think it’s time for a multiple-part series on cost codes. Cost codes...
In The News: From Finance to Customer Acquisition Catalyst SunShot Finalists Compete to Launch Big
"In January, SunShot competitively selected 17 teams to move forward in the overall Catalyst Prize competition. Each of the teams had 60 days to build a prototype product using the TopCoder platform, a 700,000 member community of software developers managed by...
Getting Into Details: Estimating Travel Costs on a Big Solar Project
Last week we cruised through an average travel costs calculation for your solar estimate. This week we will go into a detailed mode! The other approach to breaking down travel costs involves getting closer: project level detail. Really it’s unit price estimating in...