A milestone is a significant moment in a solar project worth memorializing. Aurora now allows you to mark a design with a milestone, allowing you to 1) quickly understand the progress of a project 2) decide which design to open and edit and 3) save a permanent, secure source of truth for what the design looked like at that milestone. For example, when a contract is signed, you can assign the agreed upon design as “Sold.” Even if you need to make changes after the sale, either for a change order or to prepare the design for plan set/install, you will always be able to easily see which design was sold and exactly what was sold.
Example of an completed (installed) project
At a glance, you can see that the design “Regular System” was installed and that the design “Premium System” was sold but then canceled.
Via the Milestones timeline view on the right, you can track the progress of the project and access view-only copies of each design as they were at a given milestone. So if you click the “Sold from Regular System” milestone, even if there were changes to Regular System prior to install, you can see what the customer agreed to initially.
From looking at the timeline, you can see that the order of events for this project were:
- “Regular System” and “Premium System” offered.
- “Premium System” sold.
- The customer changed their mind and agreed to buy “Regular System” after some updates. This also canceled the sale of “Premium System.”
- Finally, “Regular System” was installed.
Note that at this point, if post-install design changes are needed, you can still edit the design. After you’ve made changes, you can always check the timeline view to see how the design was originally installed. Then, if you end up reinstalling the system, you can create another Install milestone to reflect the updates.
Table of Contents
Marking a design with a milestone
Marking a design with a milestone
To assign a milestone to a design, use the “...” menu on the project overview page
A modal will pop up with a list of Milestones and a space to add notes that will appear in the timeline view.
For now, the milestone options available are Offer, Sold, Installed, Canceled.
Marking a design as Canceled will show up as Canceled offer, Canceled sale, or Canceled install in the timeline view to clearly indicate the previous milestone.
Depending on demand, in the future we will consider adding other milestones and/or providing customizability, including aliases for these names and custom milestones. Please contact support or your customer success manager with any needs.
There are no rules or restrictions on setting milestones except:
- If the current milestone is Canceled or if the design does not have a milestone yet, then you cannot assign Canceled.
- You can only have one Sold design in a project. If you assign Sold to a project that already has a Sold design, Canceled will automatically be assigned to the previously Sold design.
After saving a milestone, the Milestone column on the project page and the design page will update and the Milestone timeline will appear on the right.
You can show and hide the Milestone timeline as needed.
Viewing a milestone
To view what the design looked like at a given milestone, click on one of the milestones in the timeline view (the current selection will highlight on hover)
An interactive 3D view of the design (and pages for pricing and storage, accessible via the dropdown menu in the header) is available. This page is view-only, to provide a permanent source of truth for the milestone.
You can click around and see high fidelity design details, including site and component details, performance simulation results, and access to useful downloads like Shade Report and Bill of Materials.
API access
You can also assign and update milestones via the design endpoints in the Sync API.