Notice to Proceed Readiness Checker

Notice to Proceed, usually written NTP, is the internal authorization that a signed residential solar deal has cleared every prerequisite and may now consume resources: material ordering, crew scheduling and, on most funding structures, the first milestone draw. It is not issued by the utility or the building department. It is issued by whoever carries the financial risk of the install, which may be the installer, the EPC or the fulfillment partner depending on how the relationship is structured.

Four gates. The contract is clean: executed by every party on title, past any statutory rescission window, and reflecting the final system size, price and financing product. The design is final and accepted, meaning the site survey is complete and the homeowner has re-signed if the design changed. Financing is approved and documented at the final numbers with stipulations cleared. And eligibility conditions are closed: HOA approval where required, roof condition resolved, utility account holder confirmed as a signatory, and no unresolved title issues.

In order of frequency: a design change from the site survey that the homeowner has not re-signed; a lender stipulation nobody was assigned to clear; a missing signature from a co-owner on title; HOA approval that was never applied for; and a utility account holder mismatch. The common feature is that each is a small task with no named owner. A deal at the NTP gate is not being worked by default. It is only being worked if somebody specific owns the specific blocker.

No, though they usually coincide. NTP is an authorization to start work; M1 is a payment event, the first milestone draw a lender releases. Most funding products tie the first draw to the commencement of work, so the two tend to happen together, but they are governed by different documents and can move independently. A deal can clear NTP internally and still not draw if the funding agreement conditions M1 on something the lender has not received.

It is a risk trade rather than a right answer. Submitting before NTP starts the jurisdiction's review clock sooner and compresses the schedule, but spends permit fees and engineering time on a deal that may never clear. Submitting after NTP wastes nothing but adds review time to the back of the schedule. Organisations with a high NTP clearance rate generally submit earlier; those with a high post-survey redesign rate should not, because a permit set built on a design that then changes has to be resubmitted.

For a clean deal with an accurate proposal and an early site survey, days rather than weeks. The number that matters to a business is not the median but the tail. The share of deals sitting at the gate for weeks. That is why NTP ageing broken down by reason code is more useful than a count of deals awaiting NTP: the count tells you there is a problem, the reason codes tell you what to do about it.

The party carrying the financial risk should own the decision, and the party that closed the deal should own the homeowner conversation. Both should be named before the blockers occur. The failure mode is a structure where the sales organisation believes fulfillment is chasing the missing document and fulfillment believes sales is chasing it because it involves the homeowner, at which point nobody is chasing it and the deal ages indefinitely.