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How to Read the Proposal Output

Updated 25 July 2026·5 min read

The finished model, and the rules behind its numbers:

  • The verdictpayback year and net earnings after payback, from the same series the cashflow chart plots — the two can never disagree.
  • One accounting rulewholesale market revenue is folded into the headline payback and totals; bill-impact figures stay honest (self-consumption + demand only).
  • The leversdiscount rate, analysis years, price escalation (years 1–3 and 4+), export escalation and depreciation — every number on the page follows them.
  • Three tabsOverview tells the story, Energy explores production vs consumption, Costs is installer-only and never reaches the customer.
  • Customer shareShare with Customer publishes a read-only link with installer cost detail stripped out — safe to send as-is.
  • Stalenesschange an upstream input and the page flags the model stale and recalculates, so an exported proposal never trails the inputs.

How the underlying production and dispatch numbers are made lives in the modelling guide.

The Output page is the finished financial model — the page a proposal is built from. The verdict hero answers the customer’s only question (when does it pay for itself, and what does it earn after that), the charts below show how, and the bottom bar turns it into a deliverable. This page explains the accounting rules those numbers follow.

The verdict

The headline states the payback year and the net earnings after it, over the analysis horizon. The “then earns” figure is taken from the same series the cashflow chart plots — cumulative cashflow, net of the upfront investment — so the hero and the chart can never disagree. Underneath sit the four finance figures: IRR, NPV (at the discount rate you set), ROI and LCOE.

One accounting rule

When the battery earns wholesale market revenue (spot arbitrage), that income is folded into the headline — payback, annual benefit and totals — with no separate callout. The bill figures stay honest: “bill saved per year” counts only self-consumption and demand reduction, because market revenue never appears on an electricity bill. If the headline benefit reads higher than the bill saving, that gap is the market revenue.

The levers

Adjust assumptions (on the Cashflow card) opens the levers every number on the page follows:

Applying recalculates the whole model. If you change an upstream input elsewhere in the project, the page flags the model stale and recalculates too — an exported proposal never trails the inputs.

The three tabs

What the customer sees

Share with Customer publishes a read-only link to this page with the installer-only cost detail stripped out server-side — the Costs tab and its data simply don’t exist in what they receive, so the link is safe to send as-is. The PDF proposal and the data bundle come from the same model via the bottom-bar menu.

How the production, consumption and battery-dispatch numbers underneath are made lives in How the modelling works; scheme money on the quote itself is covered in How to read the pricing build sheet.

Related docs

Getting Started: Your First ProjectA start-to-finish walkthrough of building your first Amperage project: bill entry, consumption upload, solar and battery sizing, recommendations, and proposal export.How to Read the Pricing Build SheetHow the Amperage pricing build sheet totals itself: the order money accrues, upfront credits vs annual LGC revenue, margin vs markup, the $/W and $/kWh meters, and the section model.GlossaryDefinitions of the financial and energy terms used across Amperage: NPV, IRR, payback period, export ratio, self-sufficiency, TOU tariffs, demand charges, capex and more.

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