It’s 2026 and your close rate is being throttled by design turnaround, not sales skill. A homeowner wants a proposal Tuesday night; your designer is three roofs deep, the auto-roof pulled a 2019 imagery tile that missed the new dormer, and the shade model says 94% TSRF on a plane your installer knows is buried behind a redwood by 3pm. Then NEM 3.0 math turns a “9-year payback” into 13 once the battery is sized honestly, the customer gets a competing bid with a real production number, and you eat the loss. Meanwhile you’re paying for seats, imagery credits, and outsourced design fees you’ve never actually reconciled against jobs closed — and the AHJ kicked back two plan sets last month for revisions nobody logged as labor.
Written for solar business owners and sales managers running crews from two installers to fifty — the person signing the software invoice and answering for gross margin. You should already understand basic PV system design vocabulary, string sizing at a conceptual level, and how your local interconnection and permitting process works. This is a platform, workflow, and unit-economics guide: it is not an NABCEP study aid, not an electrical code course, not a lead-generation playbook, and it does not teach you to design a system from scratch.
Be clear-eyed about the AI here. Automated roof detection and plane segmentation from lidar and high-resolution imagery are genuinely good now — fast, repeatable, and accurate enough on simple gable and hip roofs that manual tracing is often wasted labor. Where it degrades: stale or low-resolution imagery, complex multi-plane roofs, obstructions added since the last flyover, tree canopy that models as static geometry when it’s growing, and setback interpretation that varies by jurisdiction. Shade modeling deviates from field readings in predictable directions, and that deviation compounds into production guarantees you may be contractually bound to. Human review is non-negotiable on three things: obstruction and setback verification against a recent site photo or visit, shade results on any plane with meaningful canopy, and final production numbers before they appear on a signed contract.
What This Guide Covers
- How to read auto-roof output critically — the specific roof conditions where AI detection reliably fails, so you know when to trust it and when to send someone up
- A head-to-head accuracy comparison on real roofs, with measured manual-correction time so you can price design labor honestly instead of guessing
- Where Aurora’s full stack earns its cost, and where you’re paying for capability your crew size will never use
- What OpenSolar’s free model actually costs you — where the revenue comes from and which strings are attached to Fusion+ integrations
- Shade analysis validated against field instrument readings, including the direction and magnitude of deviation that puts production guarantees at risk
- A true cost-per-closed-job framework covering seats, imagery credits, and outsourced design fees — the number most owners have never calculated
- NEM 3.0 and battery modeling that survives contact with reality, including how to represent SGIP and ITC adders without overpromising payback
- Side-by-side proposal building on the same address in both platforms, so you can see exactly where the workflows diverge and where time disappears
- Honest assessment of the challengers — Solargraf, Scanifly, PVcase Roof, and Pylon — and the specific situations where each beats the incumbents
- How to wire design into your CRM, financing, and canvassing tools without losing data at every handoff
- Permit plan set turnaround and AHJ rejection patterns, including the revision labor that never shows up on any invoice
- The expensive mistakes installers repeat — misread imagery dates, unverified setbacks, optimistic shade assumptions — and the checks that prevent them
- Case studies from real installers at different crew sizes, showing what they switched to and what it did to their margin
- A decision matrix keyed to crew size and job mix, so you leave with a choice rather than a comparison chart
Instant online access immediately after checkout — the complete guide, delivered the moment you buy. No upsell, no subscription, no follow-on course.
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.