How to use Sunlight Financial on OpenSolar

How to use Sunlight on OpenSolar

In this Article we will help you to:

1. Understand the customer experience
2. Configure Sunlight Financial on OpenSolar
3. Understand how dealer fees are treated
4. Add Sunlight Financial Payment Options to a project
5. Set prices for each design and payment option on a project

To learn about how you can set up Sunlight Financial on OpenSolar, please read this article. 

Customer Experience

Check out this video to see what your customer’s experience will be when they apply for a Sunlight loan through OpenSolar.

• When a customer accesses their online proposal for a project with an integrated Sunlight loan option, they will now be able to apply for the loan and/ or apply for prequalification directly from the online proposal.  When a Sunlight option is the selected Payment Option, the “Accept Proposal” button will be replaced with an “Apply Now” button.  

• Clicking this button will open up the Sunlight credit application.  To support as many sales workflows as possible, we have added links to apply for pre-qualification or to accept the proposal below the “Apply Now” button.

Once your customer is approved, they can request their loan docs be sent to them from the application decision page.  If they would like the loan documents resent, they can request them from the online proposal or you can directly send them from the online proposal page.

All subsequent project steps (paperwork collection, milestone documentation submission, etc.) will continue to take place directly on Sunlight Financial’s Orange Portal.

Configure Sunlight Financial on OpenSolar

Once you have signed the Sunlight addendum, Sunlight will notify OpenSolar and we’ll activate the integration and notify you once it is complete.

The first thing that we recommend that you do is enter the dealer fees associated with each loan product, so they can be properly accounted for in your pricing.  To do this, go to the Payment Options area of the Control Zone, find the Sunlight product you want to set the dealer fee for and hit the “edit” icon.

You’ll see that certain fields are pre-populated and locked (e.g. interest rate, loan term, prepayment structure) - these are the parameters that define the loans that Sunlight offers.  Other fields are not pre-populated or locked (e.g. down payment, dealer fee) - you can edit these as you previously did.

Add Payment Options to a Design in Studio

You will see the new, pre-configured Sunlight payment options listed in the Payment Options section of the Control page. If you have set any Sunlight payment options as default they will be included on each design by default, and you can override the defaults at the project level.

Customize Pricing by System or Payment Option

In Design, you will have the ability to set prices at the system and payment option level.  Put another way, if you are presenting two designs with two payment options each, you can set four different prices.  The OpenSolar tool will automatically calculate the price for each design based on your pricing scheme, and will account for the overhead of dealer fees, but you can review and make any changes that are appropriate for your business.

To do this, you will click on the “Customize price by system and payment option” button, and you’ll see a window like the one below.  Simply enter the price you’d like to charge for each option.  The discount will then be calculated to show your desired system price.  You can also update the down payment for any design or payment option from this window.

Pro Tip: Please keep in mind that if you override a price, that price will no longer automatically update as you change the design (even if your design changes significantly increase the cost of the system).  Please double-check these overrides before presenting to your customer.  

How Dealer Fees are Treated

One important change to note is that OpenSolar will incorporate dealer fees differently for Sunlight loans than it does for other payment options.

For standard payment options (i.e. non Sunlight Financial), OpenSolar...

1. Calculates the dealer fee for each payment option being offered on a particular design
2. Sets the “Standard System Price” for all payment options to cover the HIGHEST of all the dealer fees for that design (so it adds the highest dealer fee to the base system price)
3. Automatically adds a discount to each payment option, to net out any excess dealer fees so that the “Total System Price” for each system equals the base system price plus the dealer fee for that payment option.
   
   For more information on how OpenSolar handles standard payment options please visit this HelpCenter article.

If a Sunlight Payment option is being offered on a design, the system will stop at Step 2 above for all payment options on the design.  If you would like to discount certain payment options (e.g. cash discount) you will need to do so manually.

Apply a Discount

Any discounting that you would like to include must be done manually in Design.  You can apply discounts at the design and payment option level by clicking “Customize price by system and payment option” and then selecting from the Pricing & Payment Options section (See image below).

See table below to see how the Standard System Price, Discount and Total System Price are calculated for three sample payment options using the Sunlight vs. Non-Sunlight methodologies.

(Googledoc that table came from)