🇦🇺 How to set up Solar Victoria Home Rebate and Interest Free Loan?

This article talks about the Victorian Solar Homes Rebate program and is in continuation of How to Set Up Incentives. Please visit the previous article to see the types of incentives available and how to set them up. This article guides you through:

1. Configure the Victorian Solar Home Rebate and Interest-Free Loan in the Control Zone 
2. Apply the incentive to specific projects
3. Configure and apply the loan repayment schedule for the Interest-Free Loan

The Victorian Government gives rebates of up to $1400 (or 50%) for Solar installations to homeowners and rental properties, and subject to eligibility, the homeowners can also apply for an interest-free loan for an amount equivalent to the rebate amount, which can be repaid over four years.

The rebate is ‘up to’ a value of $1,400 or 50% of the system's price, whichever is lower (Note: The price of the System is the amount after the STC point of Sale discount is applied). 

Configuring the Victorian Solar Homes Rebate and Interest-Free Loan

Navigate to Control > Other > Incentives - From here, you will be taken to a list of your current incentives. If the Victorian Solar Home Rebate incentive already exists in the list, you can click on edit to verify the settings, and if it does not appear in the list, click on create.

Victorian Solar Home Rebate

Title: Set the incentive title as "Victorian Solar Home Rebate". This will take you into the incentive setting, where you can specify the following fields:

• Description: Set a description for the incentive, which would be visible to the customer on the proposal. It could be as simple as a line saying, "Up to $1,400 Solar Home Rebate provided by the Victorian Government".
• Incentive type: Set it as a Price Based Incentive.
• Price-based incentive type: Set the type as Price Payable Including Tax.
• Percentage of Price(%): As the incentive is up to 50% of the price payable, set it to 50.
• Incentive Paid to: Select Installer from the drop-down menu. This affects how the incentive would be applied to the cost of the system and how it appears on the proposal.
• Cap amount ($): Set the cap amount to $1,400.

Victorian Solar Interest-Free Loan

Title: Set the incentive title as "Victorian Solar Interest-Free Loan". This will take you into the incentive setting, where you can specify the following fields:

• Description: Set a description for the incentive, which would be visible to the customer on the proposal. It could be as simple as a line saying, "$1,400 Interest-Free Loan provided by the Victorian Government".
• Incentive type: Set it as a 'Fixed'.
• Incentive Paid to: Select Installer from the drop-down menu. This affects how the incentive would be applied to the cost of the system and how it appears on the proposal.
• Incentive Value ($): Set the amount to $1,400.

Applying the Victorian Solar Home Rebate and Interest-Free Loan Incentives to a Project 

Once you have configured the above incentives in your account, you can proceed to the Design tab for a specific project where you wish to apply these rebates. 

Once the designing of the system is complete, perform the following steps in the exact same order (as the order in which the incentives are applied is important)

• Go to the Incentives tab in the left sidebar in the design zone.
• Click on Override Default Incentives
• Select the following incentives in the same order:
  1. STC Point of Sale Discount
  2. Victorian Solar Home Rebate
  3. Victorian Solar Interest-Free Loan (if the customer is eligible and applying for the loan)

Configuring and applying the Loan repayment schedule

The loan repayments to the Victorian government are not included in the financials but can be shown as a separate recurring cost for the customer.

You must calculate the recurring repayment cost for each case, as the loan amount can differ and depends upon the repayment frequency (i.e., Weekly, Fortnightly or Monthly).

This amount can be added as another component in the app's Control zone to configure the customer's recurring payment schedule. Go to control > design & hardware > other components > + add from database > 

Enter the following details:

• Code: You can enter any code, for example, VIC Loan, to represent that component.
• Title: The title is what the customer will see as the repayment heading, for example, "Vic Solar 0% Interest Loan Repayment".
• Manufacturer: The manufacturer field can be left blank in this case.
• Description: A description of how the repayments will work should be entered here. This will help the customer understand the process of repayments and the loan. It could be as simple as a line saying, "Choosing to take the VIC 0% interest loan reduces your Upfront Purchase Price. You will, however, be required to repay this loan over 4 years at up to $29.17 per week (fortnightly and monthly options as well)."
• Enable both the toggles Show Customer and Enable Additional Costs. Be sure to turn off the 'Show in Your Solution Section'.
• Formula: From the drop-down menu, select "Specify Value".
• Value: in the value field, enter the $ value of the repayments, which you would have calculated as shown in the example above. The value depends on the amount of the loan and the repayment cycles. 
• Cycle Units: From the drop-down menu, you can select Monthly, Fortnightly or Weekly, depending on what option you want to show the customer. 
• Start Cycle: The start cycle should be set to 0, indicating the current Month as the starting cycle for payments.
• End Cycle: The end cycle value is the Number of repayments minus 1 (N-1), so for the above example for monthly repayments, the end cycle value for 48 months would be 47.
• Leaving all the other fields at their default values, you can now press the  button. 

The below is an example:

Once the component for the loan repayments has been created, it can be added to the project by going back into the design zone.

In the design zone:

• Go to Other Components.
• Click on  to add the component.
• Press Select and choose the 'Vic 0% Loan Repayment' component from the list of other components.
• Once the component has been added, you can move to Online Proposal to see how it displays in the quotation table.

Once the loans and the repayment components have been applied to the system, the final quotation in the proposal would contain all the information about the incentives and the additional component for the loan repayments.