Cube vs. Mosaic for a Solar EPC's Project Pipeline Forecast

Every project in development, from initial proposal through signed contract to notice to proceed, carries a different probability of actually reaching construction. Apply a stage-based conversion rate to each project's expected value rather than treating every pipeline entry as equally likely to close, so your forecast reflects the real uncertainty in projects still working through permitting or financing. Recalculate those conversion rates periodically against your own actual close history rather than setting them once and leaving them fixed, since a rate that was accurate a year ago may no longer reflect your current sales process or the markets you're bidding into.

Panels, inverters, and switchgear often have to be ordered months before a project's construction start date, which means a delay in permitting doesn't necessarily delay the equipment order, and a delay in equipment delivery doesn't necessarily delay permitting. Model these as separate tracks feeding into the same project timeline rather than one combined project duration, so a bottleneck in either one shows up clearly instead of getting averaged away. A procurement delay on a single large order can quietly push back several projects at once if your model doesn't track which projects share a common equipment order.

If your team already builds stage-weighted pipeline forecasts and separates equipment lead time from construction schedule in a spreadsheet, Cube's approach of syncing that model against your project management and procurement data keeps the logic where it's understood, without asking anyone to rebuild it inside a new interface.

Once you're running enough concurrent projects that tracking each one's stage, equipment status, and percentage-of-completion revenue in a single spreadsheet gets unwieldy, a dashboard rolling all of that into one view can help. Confirm in a demo that Mosaic's revenue recognition matches percentage-of-completion accounting rather than a simpler milestone or subscription-style model, since EPC revenue recognition has real nuance a generic template can miss.

Permitting timelines are the single least predictable variable in most solar and energy projects, varying by jurisdiction in ways that are hard to model precisely. Run the pipeline forecast at a baseline permitting timeline and a delayed case for your jurisdictions with historically slower approval processes, so a stretch of permitting delays across a few projects doesn't blow a hole in your revenue plan without warning. Keep the delayed case updated with your own recent experience by jurisdiction rather than a generic assumption applied uniformly across every market you operate in.

Jirav's driver-based forecasting is useful once you're planning to grow project volume and need the model to show how many additional installation crews, project managers, and procurement staff that growth actually requires, rather than assuming existing headcount can absorb an expanding pipeline. That tie between project volume and staffing capacity is often the real constraint on how fast an EPC contractor can actually grow, more so than sales pipeline alone.

A project can finish construction on time and still sit waiting on utility interconnection approval before it can actually be energized and revenue fully recognized, and interconnection timelines are frequently outside your control and outside the EPC contract's own schedule. Track interconnection status as its own forecast variable separate from construction completion, so a queue backlog at the utility doesn't quietly delay revenue recognition in a way your model never anticipated.

Scope changes during construction, a site condition that requires additional engineering, a customer-requested equipment change, are common enough on solar and energy projects that your forecast needs a clean way to update a project's expected revenue and cost mid-build. Confirm in a demo how change orders flow through either Cube's spreadsheet model or Mosaic's dashboard, since a tool that makes this a manual override rather than a structured update will drift out of sync with reality on your most complex projects.

Check these points in a demo before you choose:

• Ask how a change order updates a project's expected revenue and cost in Cube's spreadsheet model versus Mosaic's dashboard.
• Confirm the platform's revenue recognition follows percentage-of-completion accounting rather than a simpler milestone or subscription-style method.
• Check that stage-based conversion probabilities can be applied to each project in the pipeline.
• Verify that interconnection status can be tracked as its own variable, separate from construction completion.
• Run a delayed permitting case alongside the baseline to see whether the forecast still holds.