Subsidy is often the reason a homeowner says yes to solar. It is also one of the easiest things to get wrong on a quote, because the rules change, the amounts depend on the system size, and there is often more than one source of money.
Keep the subsidy out of your price
The most common mistake is to subtract the subsidy from the quoted price. In many schemes the installer is paid the full price and the government pays the subsidy to the customer later, after the system is installed and inspected.
If you deduct the subsidy on the quote, your quote and your invoice will not match, and the customer may expect to pay less than they will. The clearer approach is:
- Show your full price, with tax, as the amount the customer pays you.
- Show the subsidy as a separate line: the amount the customer can claim, and from whom.
Work it out by slab
Most schemes pay by capacity slab rather than a flat rate. India’s rooftop solar programme for homes is a good example. At the time of writing, the central government’s assistance under PM Surya Ghar is paid per kilowatt for the first two kilowatts, at a lower rate for the third, and capped above that. Some states add their own amount on top.
That means a quote needs to know:
- The system’s capacity, usually the DC capacity of the panels.
- The scheme’s slabs: the amount for each capacity band and any maximum.
- Each source separately: central and state amounts are paid by different bodies and can change at different times.
Always check the current rules on the scheme’s official portal. Amounts, eligibility and caps change, and some schemes apply only to homes, not to businesses.
Change the scheme in one place
When the subsidy lives in each rep’s spreadsheet, every scheme change means a month of quotes with the wrong figure. Keep the scheme as a single setting:
- One active scheme per system type, with its slabs.
- The slab picked automatically from the system’s capacity.
- Manual changes allowed for special cases, and marked as manual.
- Quotes already sent keep the figures they were sent with.
How AIMS IQ handles it
In AIMS IQ, subsidy schemes are set up per business under the solar settings, each with capacity slabs and separate central and state amounts. When a rep switches subsidy on, the solar quotation picks the slab from the system’s capacity and shows the total as the amount claimable by the customer, separate from your price. The amounts can be overridden on a quote when a case is different, and the subsidy setting also decides which parts and customer documents apply to the job.