Here is the fact that should reorganise how a solar company tracks work.
A residential solar project runs 6 to 12 weeks from signed contract to activation. The physical installation takes 1 to 2 days.
Roughly two percent of the elapsed time is the part your crews control. The other ninety-eight percent is waiting in queues owned by a permitting office and a utility. Most solar tracking systems are built around the two percent.
The short answer
Build the pipeline so it continues past the sale, then measure time, not just count.
| Stage | Who controls it | Typical window |
|---|---|---|
| Lead to signed | You | Days to weeks |
| Permit submitted to approved | AHJ | 2 to 8 weeks |
| Install | You | 1 to 2 days |
| Inspection | AHJ | Days |
| Interconnection review | Utility | 45 to 75 business days in slower territories |
| PTO processing | Utility | 15 to 30 business days at Duke and PG&E |
| Final invoice | You | On PTO or inspection |
Notice how few rows say "you".
Queue one: permitting
Permit approval typically takes 2 to 8 weeks from a complete, correct submission. The qualifier carries the weight. An incomplete submission does not extend the clock, it restarts it, and the restart is usually invisible until someone calls to ask.
What to track: date submitted, date of any rejection or request for information, date resubmitted, date approved. The metric that matters is not average permit time but first-pass approval rate. A shop at 60% first-pass is silently adding weeks to a third of its jobs, and that is fixable internally, unlike the queue itself.
Queue two: interconnection
This is where solar cash goes to sit.
Several major utilities in the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic published average residential interconnection review times of 45 to 75 business days for 2026. Business days, not calendar. Seventy-five business days is roughly fifteen weeks.
By the numbers
A record 45% of Q1 2026 residential solar installs included battery storage. In SCE territory, battery systems averaged 8 to 12 weeks for PTO approval against 4 to 6 weeks for solar-only. Attaching storage improves your contract value and lengthens your cash cycle at the same time.
That tradeoff is worth stating explicitly, because storage attachment is the main lever raising average contract value right now, and almost nobody adjusts their cash forecast for the longer queue that comes with it.
Queue three: PTO
Duke Energy and PG&E published 2026 PTO processing windows of 15 to 30 business days for residential customers. National Grid customers commonly see 3 to 5 months from contract all the way to PTO.
The spread across utilities is the point. A job waiting 20 business days for PTO is unremarkable in one territory and overdue in another. Which is why the only useful version of this report compares each job to its own queue's baseline.
The report that actually runs a solar operation
One report, run Monday morning:
Signed jobs not yet activated, grouped by queue, sorted by days waiting, oldest first.
That is it. It converts a backlog into a call list. Most standard pipeline views cannot produce it, because their stages end at "won" and they count jobs rather than measuring time.
Add one column: the published window for that queue. Now a job at 52 business days in a 45 to 75 day territory reads as normal, and a job at 52 days in a 30 day territory reads as a phone call you should have made two weeks ago.
The post-signature queues are the part most solar software leaves as a status field nobody updates. We build them as real stages with clocks attached, so the Monday list writes itself. Bring your own pipeline and we will show you where the time is actually going.
Why the invoice is not the finish line
Solar is milestone billed. A deposit at signing, a progress payment around install, final billing at inspection or PTO. That is three cash events per job, spread across a quarter.
A workflow built to raise one invoice on completion will misstate both revenue timing and cash position, and it will do so quietly. The specific things to get right:
- Deposits recorded against the job, not as unallocated income
- Progress payments tied to a milestone that a human actually confirms
- Final billing triggered by PTO or inspection, whichever your contract specifies
- Dealer fees on financed systems, which change the effective revenue on a job without appearing in your marketing or operations numbers
If your accounting integration only supports a single invoice per job, it is working against the way this trade gets paid. We cover what to check when pairing tools in best CRM for solar companies.
The five numbers that locate the leak
- First-pass permit approval rate. Internal, fixable, and directly worth weeks.
- Median days in interconnection, by utility. Your real cash cycle, and it is not one number.
- Signature to activation conversion. What share of signed contracts reach PTO. This is the number that makes a revenue forecast honest, and it feeds directly into how many solar leads do I need per month.
- Days from install to PTO. Isolates utility drag from your own scheduling.
- Aged signed backlog. Total contract value sitting in queues, by age bucket. This is the number to look at before deciding you have a lead generation problem.
That last one matters more than it sounds. A shop with $400,000 stuck in interconnection does not have a demand problem, it has a throughput problem, and buying more leads makes it worse.
Commercial runs the same structure on a different clock
A 500 kW ground mount commonly takes 6 to 18 months from application to PTO, because it triggers environmental review, conditional use permits and multi-phase interconnection studies.
Do not run commercial jobs through residential stage definitions. Every one of them will show as overdue from week three, the alerts become noise, and the team stops reading them. Separate stage sets, separate baselines.
The 30-day build
Week 1. Add the post-signature stages: permit submitted, permit approved, installed, inspection passed, interconnection submitted, PTO received. Backfill open jobs.
Week 2. Stamp entry dates on every stage change so days-in-stage computes automatically. Manual date fields decay within a month.
Week 3. Record the published window per utility and AHJ you work with. Without baselines, the report cannot separate waiting from stuck.
Week 4. Build the Monday list, put one named person on it, and start recording first-pass permit rate.
None of this requires new software on day one. It requires stages that reflect how solar actually moves, which is mostly by sitting still in somebody else's queue. Where the operations tooling should live is covered in CRM vs field service software for solar.