Initial vs Advanced Projects

Every project is either Initial or Advanced, and the badge in the project header tells you which. The short version: Initial answers what size system does this site need, and is the job worth chasing. Advanced is where you commit to a specific system, price it, and produce something you can put in front of the customer.

Most projects start in Initial and move to Advanced once the customer is serious. You can switch either way at any time.

What both modes share

The first three stages are identical in both modes: Details, Bill Data and Consumption. Same fields, same uploads, same AI bill extraction. This is the part that takes real effort, and none of it is wasted if you picked the “wrong” mode to begin with, because switching keeps all of it.

Initial: size the job

After the shared stages, an Initial project has two more:

• Solar & Battery — set the search bounds and decide whether storage is on the table. This builds the sizing matrix: every solar size crossed with every battery size, each modelled hour-by-hour against the site's actual load and local weather data.
• Recommendation — the ranked scenario cards, with ROI, payback, and the incentives the site qualifies for.

What you walk away with is a defensible answer on system size and financials. What you don't have yet is a layout, a specific product list, or a price.

Advanced: commit and quote

An Advanced project replaces those two stages with four. The shared first three stay exactly as they were.

Solar Design

Map out the roof. You define faces — draw them over the satellite image, import them, or start from a roof shape — and each face carries its own orientation, pitch and usable area. The system size then splits across those faces by area, so production is modelled per face instead of as one averaged array. A north-facing face and a west-facing one contribute different shapes of generation, and that difference flows through to the financials.

Battery Design

Move from “how many kWh” to specific hardware: battery and inverter stacks, sized and configured as you would actually install them.

Pricing

Your costs and your margins, on a build sheet that shows how the final number is assembled (how to read the pricing build sheet).

Output

The customer-facing proposal, pulling the design, the modelling and the price into one document (how to read the proposal output).

Which one should I start in?

Start in Initial unless you already know the job is going ahead. Most enquiries don't convert, and roof faces, hardware selection and pricing are the slowest parts of the process. Doing that work before the customer has seen a payback figure means doing it for jobs that were never going to happen.

The natural sequence is: qualify in Initial, show the customer the recommendation, and convert to Advanced when they want a real quote.

Switching between them

Use the project type control in the project header. It works in both directions, and the Details, Bill Data and Consumption work carries over untouched — nothing is re-entered.

Switching back from Advanced to Initial hides the Advanced-only stages rather than deleting what you did in them. If you convert to Initial and later convert back to Advanced, your Solar Design, Battery Design and Pricing work is still there.

Availability

Initial projects are available on every plan. Advanced projects are available on the Pro tier and during the trial. If your project header shows an Initial badge with no way to convert, that is why.