Guides
Solar installer KPIs owners should track monthly
Solar installer KPIs worth tracking monthly: six measures, each with its formula, the point at which to act on it, and the thing it is blind to.
What to take away
- Six measures, and no more, for a company with one or two crews. Anything longer gets abandoned in the busy season, which is when it was needed.
- Every measure below has a stated blind spot. A measure trusted beyond what it can see is worse than no measure at all.
- The action thresholds are relative to your own history, not to any published benchmark. Nobody outside your company can tell you what good looks like here.
- The one to start with is days from install to permission to operate, split three ways, because it exposes the part of the delay you control.
How to read each entry
Formula, where the data comes from, when to act, and what it cannot tell you. The action lines are written against your own trailing history rather than against an external figure, because an external figure for this trade would be someone else's territory, roof stock, and utility.
1. Survey survival rate
Formula: surveys that became signed jobs, divided by surveys performed, split by lead source.
Data: your job record, tagged with the lead source at intake.
Act when: the rate for any source drops below where that source has been sitting, or when the rate rises sharply. A rise is not automatically good, because it can mean the surveyor has stopped refusing work.
Blind to: whether the jobs you accepted were the right ones. It says nothing about quality, and it can be improved by lowering your standards at survey, which is the failure mode to watch for.
2. First-time inspection pass rate
Formula: inspections passed without correction, divided by inspections attended. Categorize every correction by type.
Data: permit records.
Act when: the same category of correction appears three times, or when the rate falls for one crew but not others.
Blind to: leaks, production, and everything else that appears later. An inspection checks a sample of what is visible on the day.
3. Days from install to permission to operate
Formula: three gaps, tracked separately. Install to inspection passed. Inspection to your utility submission. Submission to permission received.
Data: four dates on every job.
Act when: either of the first two gaps grows. The third is the utility's, and the honest response is to tell customers about it rather than to try to fix it.
Blind to: everything about workmanship. A fast job can be a bad job.
4. Crew days per job, by scope
Formula: total crew days consumed, including partial days, return visits, and inspection attendance, divided by jobs, split by scope.
Data: a daily record of what each crew did, including the days it did nothing.
Act when: actual crew days exceed the estimate used in quoting for the same scope more than occasionally. That is a pricing problem rather than a crew problem, and the fix is in the estimate.
Blind to: why. It tells you the estimate was wrong, not whether the cause was the roof, the crew, or the design.
5. Contribution per crew day, by scope
Formula: revenue attributed to a scope, less its direct cost, divided by the crew days it consumed.
Data: job costing, which requires cost attached to jobs rather than to general accounts.
Act when: a scope sits below your ordinary work for two consecutive quarters. Either reprice it, stop selling it, or decide deliberately that it exists to win other work.
Blind to: cash timing. A scope with good contribution and a long wait for payment is still financing your customers.
6. Service visits per hundred jobs, by install month
Formula: service visits, tagged to the month the original job was installed, per hundred jobs installed in that month.
Data: every service visit linked back to its original job.
Act when: any install month stands out. Then look at what was different in that period: a substituted material, a new crew member, a supply change, or a run of unusually hot or wet weather during installs.
Blind to: anything in the last twelve months, because this measure arrives late by its nature. It is a historian, not an alarm.
The summary table
| Measure | Tells you about | Blind to | Arrives |
|---|---|---|---|
| Survey survival rate | Lead quality by channel | Whether you accepted the right jobs | Within weeks |
| First-time inspection pass | Design and visible workmanship | Leaks and production | Within weeks |
| Days to permission to operate | Your administration and the utility | Workmanship entirely | Within weeks |
| Crew days per job | Whether your estimates hold | Why they did not | Immediately |
| Contribution per crew day | Which work is worth doing | Cash timing | Monthly |
| Service visits by install month | Attachment and commissioning quality | Anything recent | After a year or more |
Six measures, and each one blind to something another sees. That is the argument for six rather than one.
What to leave out
Revenue per month, because in this trade it reflects when the utility acted rather than what you did.
Leads per month, because a lead that will not survive a survey is not a result.
Customer satisfaction as a single score, because it mostly measures the waiting and the communication rather than the installation. Useful, but not one of the six.
Anything with no action attached. A measure you look at and do nothing about is a habit, not a control.
The monthly hour
Reserve an hour. Look at the six numbers. For each, ask what changed and why. Name one action. Write it down with an owner and a date, and check it next month.
That is the whole system. The temptation is to build something more elaborate, and the more elaborate version is the one abandoned in July.
Where the numbers live
All six come off the job record, which has to hold work and cost together. What that record must contain, and how to choose something that can hold it, is in the software and measurement guide for solar owners.
Two practical prerequisites. Someone has to record what each crew did each day, including idle days, or measures four and five cannot be produced. And every service visit has to be linked back to its original job, or measure six is impossible to construct later.
Whether the crew can capture the underlying evidence at all depends on what is on the vehicle, which is the load list in the equipment and setup guide for solar crews, and whether they do it consistently is a training matter covered in the hiring and training guide for solar contractors.
The records standard underneath
The financial half of this depends on bookkeeping that meets an ordinary standard. The Internal Revenue Service's guidance on records a small business should keep describes a system that clearly shows income and expenses with documents supporting purchases, sales, payroll, and assets. Job costing does that and produces measures four and five as a byproduct.
Protecting the data these measures sit on
The same records hold customer addresses, photographs inside homes, and payment information. The National Institute of Standards and Technology publishes small business quick-start guides written for organizations without security staff, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency maintains resources for small and medium businesses. Multi-factor authentication, individual accounts, and a backup you have restored from once are the practical minimum.
When the measures should change
When you add a scope, when you add a crew, or when you enter a new jurisdiction or utility territory. Each of those changes what the numbers mean, and comparing across the change without noting it produces false conclusions. That is part of the assessment described in the expansion guide for solar contractors.
Common questions
How many months before these are useful?
Three for the first four measures. Twelve for contribution by scope if your work is seasonal. Longer still for service visits, which is why the evidence has to be captured from day one.
What if I only have one crew?
Then measures four and five matter more, not less, because every day spent on poor work is a day nobody else can cover.
Should I share these with the crew?
Share the inspection pass rate and the days to energization, because those are things the crew affects and can be proud of. Keep the financial ones between the owner and whoever manages the money.
Is there a benchmark to compare against?
Not one worth using. Your own trailing history is the comparison, and any published figure for this trade reflects a different territory and a different utility.
