WorkInternal toolsCosting & pricing
Costing and pricing for custom solar systems
Pricing a custom solar system meant combining technical configuration, manufacturing costs and commercial rules that changed with the project.
I built the costing and pricing workflow so the team could move from a configured system to a consistent customer quote using the same underlying data.
500+
customer quotes in ten months
3 h → 15 min
to prepare a quote
The challenge
A quote depended on more than a product list. Materials, manufacturing work, system configuration, quantity, market, margin, discounts and currency could all affect the final price.
The challenge was to make those rules repeatable while still giving the team enough flexibility for custom projects.
What I built
I built a workflow that connected technical configuration, production costs and commercial pricing.
- Production costing
- The calculation engine combined component costs with manufacturing inputs and production work to estimate the cost of a configured panel or system.
- Pricing rules
- The commercial layer applied market specific margins, quantity discounts, manual discounts, B2B or B2C logic and currency conversion to the calculated cost.
- Quotes and projects
- Pricing stayed attached to the underlying customer project and simulation, allowing the team to turn configured systems into customer ready proposals.
My role
I built and maintained the workflow as CAPSolar's sole full stack developer.
My work covered the data model, calculation logic, pricing interface, project workflow, PDF generation, deployment and production support.
The result
Costing, pricing and quoting could work from the same system configuration instead of being recreated independently for each proposal.
Preparing a quote went from about 3 hours to 15 minutes, and more than 500 customer quotes were generated through the system in its first ten months.
Stack
- Interface
- Next.jsTypeScript
- Calculations
- Python
- Data
- PostgreSQL
- Infrastructure
- DockerAWS
Try a similar quoting workflow
The CPQ I built for a specialty coffee roastery follows the same kind of configuration and pricing workflow, and you can try it directly.
Working with complex pricing rules?
I build purpose built software for quoting, estimating and other workflows where spreadsheets become difficult to maintain.
Prefer to reach out directly?[email protected]LinkedIn ↗