I am driving to the Solar Software Summit, and you should let me know if you’d like to meet up there. It’s a road trip! Except, I’ve been on the road a while now so maybe it’s a bit of an excursion. I thought I would blog about something related: travel. This is hard thing to track because variation occurs with the project size, distance, traffic, and whatever other nuances are involved. The distance to site is typically not tracked in accounting data. And to compound it, a lot of companies roll their truck maintenance/gas costs into their overhead. Cost also heavily depends on your company’s travel policy.
There are two ways to break travel costs down when doing a solar estimate. You can simply take an average of the total costs associated with travel and apply that to each project. Or, you can dig into the details of your solar project.
Let’s talk about the first option I mentioned: average costs. This method incorporates a lot of the concepts used for averages estimating. The best way to do that is to take the travel costs associated with all of your previous projects and all the travel overhead associated and the maintenance and gas costs of your fleet and divide that by the number of projects contributing to the cost. If you have a rough average distance to sites (say, we work an average of 40 miles from the office), then you can divide that into your total costs and that will give you a rough cost/mile. Simple. Not particularly intelligent but it at least allows you to apply some cost to a project based off of location; a 100 mile commute has a bigger cost than a 10 mile commute.
You have several other ways of getting to the average costs but they all are basically the same. You can find them by calculating your total historic travel costs and coming up with some mileage. For instance, you could take a sample of projects where you know the mileage and the travel costs.