Deal Fallout Cost Calculator

Deal fallout is the share of signed solar agreements that never reach a completed, funded installation. Causes include cooling-off cancellations, credit falloff or re-qualification failure, site surveys that change the design or price, homeowners losing patience during long permit waits, and HOA or utility complications. Because residential solar has a long gap between signature and install, fallout is a structural feature of the business rather than an anomaly, which is why it deserves to be budgeted rather than treated as bad luck.

Because sunk cost accumulates as a deal progresses. A deal that cancels before design has consumed only acquisition cost. One that cancels after materials are committed has consumed acquisition, design, permit fees, and whatever share of the equipment cost you cannot restock or reallocate. In most cost structures that is several times more expensive. Treating cancellations as a single blended percentage hides this entirely, two orgs with an identical 12% cancellation rate can have very different losses depending on where in the chain those cancellations happen.

Take the contribution from deals that actually installed, subtract the total sunk cost burned on deals that died, then divide by the number of installs. The result is lower than your headline margin per deal, and the difference is what this tool calls the fallout tax. It is the honest per-deal number, because every install has to carry the cost of the deals that did not make it. Quoting a headline margin that ignores fallout will overstate profitability by whatever that gap is.

Not blindly. This tool reports them separately on purpose. Sunk cost is cash you actually spent on a deal that returned nothing. Lost margin is contribution you would have earned had the deal completed. They measure different things, and if your margin-per-deal figure is already net of design, permit, and material costs, adding the two together double-counts. Use sunk cost for cash-flow decisions and lost margin for opportunity sizing.

It is often the single biggest lever on late-stage fallout cost. If committed equipment can be restocked with the distributor or reallocated to another job in your pipeline, most of that cost is recovered and a late cancellation is survivable. If it cannot, because it was a custom order, because the distributor charges heavy restocking, or because you have no other job that fits it, the full BOM value is at risk. Orgs with steady volume recover more simply because they have somewhere else to put the equipment.

Yes. If commission is paid only on install, or is clawed back when a deal dies, then a cancellation costs you the hard costs but not the commission. If your plan advances commission at signature with no recovery mechanism, that advance becomes part of the loss on every cancelled deal, and at typical residential commission levels it can exceed all the other early-stage costs combined. Seamless Home does not set commission plans; this tool just lets you see what your own structure implies.