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Aurora Q3 2023 updates: Flexible pricing, dealer customizations, and post-sales plan sets

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Note: This blog highlights Aurora updates from the third quarter of 2023, as detailed in the Quarterly Product Release Webinar held in October 2023.

It was a busy summer here at Aurora Solar, and as a result, there are many new and exciting features now live on our platform. 

Fueled by your feedback and our commitment to improving efficiency and accuracy at every step of the solar sales, design, and development process, here are the most powerful Aurora product updates that premiered in the third quarter of 2023.

Get all the info on these new features direct from our team in the latest edition of Aurora’s Quarterly Product Release Webinar Series.

Click the image to watch the full webinar on demand.

Enhanced flexibility and accuracy for PV system pricing 

To help solar reps generate better quotes, faster, we added several new features to our PV system pricing and financing tools that are designed to save time and increase data accuracy before, during, and after customer consultations. 

Incentives Database

Available to all Aurora Solar users, the Incentives Database accelerates the solar sales process with hundreds of national, state, and local incentives detailed, organized, and ready for easy incorporation into your pricing calculations. Within the database, you can search for cost- and performance-based incentives by state (such as in the image above) or by keyword, and include them in new solar proposals.  

Beyond what’s publicly available from governments, utilities, and third-party programs, Aurora’s Incentives Database also allows you to create your own custom solar incentives that can be applied seamlessly to projects you’ve created. 

Automatic Adders 

With a self-explanatory name, Automatic Adders can automatically apply pricing adders to your sales proposals when specific conditions are met by the system or project — such as the type of inverter selected or if the site’s roof pitch falls above or below a certain grade. In the image above, we’ve illustrated a per-watt adder that automatically applies to a project’s pricing calculations if a specific inverter (SUNO-U520F-12X12UW) is used. 

By relieving sales reps of the duty to remember and manually calculate price escalators, Automatic Adders can help you save time, maintain consistency, and ensure accuracy at the point of sale, no matter the size of your organization.  

Financing comparisons in Sales Mode & down payments

When presenting a proposal in Aurora Solar Sales Mode, you can now educate and visually walk your leads through their different financial options with side-by-side comparisons for loans, leases, and cash deals — plus the new ability to factor in custom down payments for financed systems. 

With live financial comparisons in Sales Mode, you can educate your leads about their payment options based on the unique aspects of their project, including the automatic calculation of important money metrics such as total investment costs, lifetime savings, and expected monthly payment rates.

Pricing via API

If you maintain your solar pricing sheet, matrix, or mechanism outside of the Aurora platform (e.g. in your CMS), our new Pricing via API capability can help you reduce errors and save time when calculating and re-calculating system costs across multiple platforms.  

For example, let’s say that you make a minor adjustment in your CRM that will increase the cost of a lead’s PV system. Using our Pricing API endpoints, this new information could automatically update in Aurora, eliminating the need to manually open the affected project and reconfigure your pricing sheet.   

Improved Partner Management — customizations & controls

The Aurora Solar Partner Management dashboard allows you to control your dealer network with all the settings, customizations, and permissions necessary to effectively expand your solar business.

In our improved Partner Management platform, you can:   

  • Set up dealers in your Aurora account within minutes and completely control what they can do and see within the platform 
  • Give your dealers access to high-powered tools like Sales Mode, Lead Capture AI, and Aurora’s Expert Modeling services
  • Set up permissions and guardrails so that dealers can customize aspects of their proposals within predefined limits, such as the ability to add a logo, adjust base price per watt, or apply adders, discounts, and more

As a central network command center, the Partner Management feature is designed to give you a unified experience when managing all of your sales partners in one location. With new intuitive features, it’s now easier than ever add dealer-to-dealer customizations and apply them to select partners.   

New post-sales plan sets features

In 2023, Aurora Solar is celebrating 10 years in business, including one year creating permit-ready plan sets for our customers (with a 93% first-time pass rating). During this time, we’ve learned a lot and have made several improvements to help solar companies more easily navigate the constantly changing and highly variable world of permit-ready plan sets for AHJs.

Solar and storage plan sets 

When using our expert Plan Sets services, Aurora users can now incorporate solar battery storage into design requests with the click of a button. Including a hardware library that covers approximately 90% of the solar battery market, our experts are now available to create permit-ready residential PV and storage system plan sets in AHJs across the country.  

Engineering Stamps from Aurora 

Designed to seamlessly integrate within your workflow, new Engineering Stamps from Aurora can accelerate a crucial step in the solar development process, particularly for companies without an in-house engineer or plan sets designer. Your designers provide us with everything needed for the homeowner’s systems and our experts ensure the technical aspects of your plans meet local codes. Solar pros can now trust an expert with Aurora to provide the Professional Engineer (PE) electrical and structural stamps necessary for AHJ submission and approval.

(To learn more about exactly what our Plan Sets Service provides, please watch the full webinar or get in touch with any specific questions.)

Recap and resources

These new features are all designed to help you save time, increase accuracy, and effectively scale your solar business. With deeper levels of customization and further control over your solar projects with guardrails, permissions, and preset proposal elements, we hope these summer of 2023 updates mark yet another step forward to help solar professionals operate as efficiently as possible. 

Click above to watch the entire webinar on demand.

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