Tracking Fieldwork KPIs with SolarGrade

SolarGrade is built around a single idea: the work your team already performs in the field should become structured, measurable data without any extra paperwork. When site visits are completed correctly, that data can be turned into key performance indicators (KPIs) that describe the safety, reliability, and operational health of your portfolio. 

This guide explains how to track fieldwork KPIs using functionality that exists in SolarGrade today. It covers four connected tools: 

• The Analytics dashboard – visual, at-a-glance safety and reliability insights across your portfolio. 
• Raw data export – issue, work order, and template data you can pull into a spreadsheet to build custom KPIs. 
• Templates – the data foundation that determines what you are able to measure in the first place. 
• Planner and Work Orders – operational KPIs such as completion rate, budget variance, and labor hours. 
• Before you begin: 
• Most KPI tools in this guide are accessed in the SolarGrade desktop (web) app. 
• The Analytics dashboard is available to admin users on Business and Enterprise accounts. Other export and Planner features are available more broadly depending on your role and plan. 
• Every KPI in this guide depends on field data being captured consistently. The section on Templates explains how to set that foundation correctly. 

The Analytics dashboard turns the records from your completed site visits into a set of charts and graphs. It is designed to give management an at-a-glance view of fleet health – the kinds of safety and reliability trends that would otherwise require manually compiling data from many individual reports. 

1. What Analytics Is and Who Can Access It 

• Purpose: Analytics aggregates issue data from across your projects into a visual dashboard so you can spot trends, problem areas, and portfolio-wide patterns. 
• Access: Analytics is available to admin users in the desktop app, on Business and Enterprise accounts. If you do not see the Analytics tab, contact your SolarGrade representative about your plan and permissions. 
• Data refresh: The dashboard updates every six hours to provide a daily snapshot of your fleet’s health. A countdown timer to the next update is shown in the upper-right corner of the dashboard. 

2. Opening the Dashboard 

• Log in to the SolarGrade desktop (web) app as an admin user. 
• Select the Analytics tab from the top navigation menu. 
• Allow the dashboard to load. Note the update countdown timer in the upper-right corner so you know how current the data is. 

3. Reading the Dashboard 

The dashboard presents your issue data as charts and graphs at the top, with a detailed issue summary table at the bottom of the page. The charts give you the high-level picture; the table lets you drill into the underlying records. 

Key concept: Only issue items appear in Analytics. In SolarGrade, all failures and non-conformities should be recorded as issue items (pass / fail / n/a). Anything captured as an informational item will not be counted in the dashboard. If a project shows fewer issues than you expect, the most common cause is that failures were logged as informational items instead of issue items. 

4. Using Filters to Build a KPI View 

Filters are the primary way you turn the dashboard into a focused KPI view. There are two sets of filters that work together: 

• Project filters (first set): control which projects are displayed. Use these to narrow the dashboard to a specific client, project, or other project attribute. 
• Issue filters (second set): control which types of issues are displayed within the selected projects. Filter by issue severity, category, or other available factors. 

By combining the two sets – for example, one client’s projects plus only high-severity issues – you can quickly isolate a specific KPI such as “critical safety findings for Client A this season.” 

Tip: Need a filter that does not exist yet? You can request additional filter options through the SolarGrade feature request form: submit a feature request. 

5. Drilling Into an Issue from the Summary Table 

The issue summary table at the bottom of the dashboard is fully searchable and filterable, and each issue links back to its source. This is also how you correct messy or inconsistent dataso future KPIs are cleaner. 

• Scroll to the issue summary table at the bottom of the Analytics page. 
• Use the search box and column filters to find the issue you are interested in. 
• Click the linked issue name to open the site visit where that issue was created. 
• If a name is inconsistent (for example “loose wire” vs. “Loose wiring”), edit the issue name directly in the site visit. You will need permission to edit that site visit. 

Why this matters for KPIs: Analytics groups issues by name. Unifying naming variations across your portfolio keeps similar issues together, prevents duplicate or miscategorized entries, and makes every trend chart more accurate. 

6. A Note on Exporting from Analytics 

You cannot export the data behind an individual chart directly from the dashboard. Instead, SolarGrade lets you export the underlying issue data at the portfolio, project, or site visit level and analyze it in a spreadsheet. The next section explains exactly how. 

The Analytics dashboard is ideal for at-a-glance monitoring, but custom KPIs – trends over time, cost per finding, completion rates, comparisons between crews or scopes – are usually built in a spreadsheet. SolarGrade lets you export several types of raw data as CSV files that you can then pivot, chart, and catalog however you like. 

1. What You Can Export 

2. Exporting Issue Data at Three Levels 

Issue data is the backbone of most field KPIs. SolarGrade lets you export it at three levels of scope, depending on whether you want the whole portfolio, one project, or a single site visit. 

Portfolio level (all projects) 

• Navigate to the Projects page. 
• Apply any filters you need using the Filter button to the right of the search bar. 
• Select the Export button to the right of the Filter button. 
• In the dropdown menu, select Export Issues. 

Project level (one project) 

• From the Projects page, open the relevant project. 
• Select the Issue Summary tab. 
• Use the column headers to filter to the information you want, if needed. 
• Click the Export Issues button at the top of the issues section. 

Site visit level (one site visit) 

• From the dashboard, open the relevant project. 
• Select the Site Visits tab. 
• Find the site visit you want to export. 
• Select the three vertical dots at the right end of that line item. 
• Select Download Issues. 

Also available per project: At the bottom of every project there is an issue table that compiles all issues found on that site. It is filterable through the column dropdown menus and can be exported to CSV. You can also correct an issue’s severity directly from this table view if it was categorized incorrectly. 

3. Exporting Work Order Data 

To analyze operational performance – completion, scheduling, budget, and hours – export your work orders from the Planner. 

• Go to the Planner tab in SolarGrade. 
• Locate the Export Work Orders button. 
• Click Export Work Orders. SolarGrade generates and downloads a CSV file. 

The work order CSV contains: all work orders, all tasks associated with each work order, and the related task details and statuses. 

4. Exporting Templates and Reports 

• Templates to CSV: You can export your templates to .csv to review and clean up naming conventions in bulk. After editing, contact SolarGrade support to re-upload the corrected template. 
• Reports to PDF/DOCX: From a generated interactive report, select Download PDF or Download .docx at the top of the report. A PDF report includes a table of all project information stored in SolarGrade and a table of all issues for that inspection. 

5. Turning Exported Data into KPIs 

Once your data is in a spreadsheet, you can build the KPIs that matter to your team. A few practical examples that the exported fields support: 

• Findings by severity or category: pivot exported issue data on severity or category to see where risk concentrates. 
• Trend over time: group issues by date to track whether open issues are rising or falling across a project or the portfolio. 
• Open vs. closed rate: issue status lets you measure how quickly findings are being remediated. 
• Budget and labor variance: from the work order export, compare budgeted vs. actual budget and projected vs. actual hours. 

Tip: table items move cleanly into spreadsheets. Within site visits, data captured in table informational items is interactive with Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets – you can copy SolarGrade table text into those programs and paste data back into SolarGrade. This is useful for measurement-heavy items such as string voltages or IV-curve traces. 

Remember: Clean exports start with clean data entry. Consistent issue names and correct issue/informational categorization (covered next) are what make spreadsheet analysis reliable. 

Your KPIs can only be as good as the data your field team captures, and what they capture is defined by your templates. A template (sometimes called a framework) is the checklist your technicians work through during a site visit. Designing it deliberately is the single most important thing you can do to make fieldwork measurable. 

1. How Templates Are Structured 

SolarGrade templates are organized as a “mind-map” of three nested levels, with each item falling into one of two types: 

• Sections – the highest-level grouping (for example, Electrical, Structural, Documentation). 
• Categories – related topics within a section (for example, Wiring within Electrical). 
• Items – the specific checkpoints, which are either informational items or issue items. 

The core rule for measurable fieldwork: If you want to measure it, make it an issue item. All failures and non-conformities should be issue items. Only issue items feed the Analytics dashboard and the issue exports. Informational items are valuable for documentation, but they are invisible to your KPIs. 

2. Design Principles for KPI-Ready Templates 

Use consistent, concise naming 

Analytics and exports group issues by name. Establish a clear naming convention and apply it across your whole portfolio so similar findings group together and you avoid duplicate or miscategorized issues. Keep names short and specific. 

Standardize template organization 

Structure your templates the same way across projects – or across the entire portfolio. You might organize by project type, by inspection phase, or by another method that fits your workflow. Consistent organization makes it far easier to compare data across projects and trust your trends. 

Keep templates broad, then tailor per visit 

It is always easier to delete than to build. Keep templates general and duplicate as needed during an inspection. For example, define a single “Inverter 1” category and duplicate it once you know how many inverters a site has, rather than hard-coding every possibility into the template. 

Preset severity and required items 

You can preset the severity of certain issues and make specific issues required for site visit completion. Presetting severity keeps your severity-based KPIs consistent; required items ensure the data points you care about are never skipped in the field. 

3. Building Templates (Recommended Path) 

Every SolarGrade account comes with roughly half a dozen default templates built using NREL guidelines. Because writing every issue description from scratch is time-consuming, SolarGrade recommends starting from a default template rather than a blank one. 

Create a template from a default template 

• Navigate to the Templates tab. 
• Toggle to Default Templates using the button of the same name. 
• Select the default template you want to use as your foundation. 
• Select “Use as a pattern for a new template.” 
• Customize the copy – drag and drop sections, categories, and items to match your ideal workflow. 

Other ways to create templates 

• From scratch: on the Templates tab in “My Templates,” scroll to the bottom, select Add Template, name it, and click Confirm. (Not recommended because of the time required to write all descriptions.) 
• From a site visit: open a dialed-in site visit, scroll to the green Generate Report button, click the gear icon beside it, and choose “Save as a template.” 
• By merging templates: on the Templates tab, find a template, select the Merge icon, choose the template to merge with, and select Merge. Sections, categories, and items with the same name are combined – another reason consistent naming matters. 

4. Validate Before You Rely on the Data 

Before using a template for live fieldwork – and before trusting the KPIs it will feed – do a quick quality check: 

• Make sure every issue item has a description. 
• Confirm the template matches your real-world checklist so the field progress bar reaches 100% when work is genuinely complete. 
• Create a test site visit, flag a few issues, and confirm the report looks the way you expect. 
• Optionally, open the template, scroll to the bottom, and click “Export template as .pdf” to review a mock report, or export to .csv to review naming conventions in bulk. 

While the Analytics dashboard measures what your team finds in the field, the Planner measures how your team performs the work. The Planner is a work order management system that gives management at-a-glance visibility of on-site activity and progress across all projects and teams – making it a powerful source of operational KPIs. 

1. How Planner Is Organized 

The Planner is divided into two parts: work orders and tasks. 

• Work Order (WO): a group of tasks to be performed and completed for a client as part of a contract or scope of work. How you scope a WO is flexible – it can represent a single task, a single contract or invoice, or an entire scope of work spanning a year. 
• Tasks: the line items within a work order. There are three types: 
• Site visits – standard template-based site visits, either linked from existing ones or newly created. 
• Punchlists – a site visit type for remedial work, built from open issues in the project. 
• Custom – a free-text item for work not tied to a site visit (for example, “Book travel and accommodations”). 

You can view all of this on the Planner page in either a Table view or a Gantt view, using the toggle at the top left. Together they give managers project-management visibility and progress tracking. 

2. The Metrics Planner Gives You 

Several built-in fields turn the Planner into a tracking tool. Understanding each one tells you which operational KPIs you can report on. 

Status as a progress signal 

Both work orders and tasks carry a status, which lets you measure where work sits in your pipeline. 

Note: setting a work order’s status to Archived automatically archives the work order. 

Percentage completion 

The percentage completion figure shows the progress of a work order based on completed tasks only. This is a ready-made milestone KPI for tracking whether work is progressing as expected. 

Budget and hours vs. actual budget and actual hours 

Each work order has both planned and actual fields, which together let you measure variance: 

• Budget and Hours: manual-entry fields you set when creating the WO, based on the scope of work and what you intend to bill. 
• Actual Budget: automatically calculated as the sum of the completed task budget fields within that WO. 
• Actual Hours: automatically calculated as the sum of all completed task hours fields within that WO. 

Comparing planned against actual while a WO is underway tells you whether you are tracking within budget and hours – a direct measure of how your team is performing. 

Work order history 

Each work order has a historical log recording every change to that WO and its tasks over time. To view it, click the three vertical dots on the far right of the WO card and select History. This audit trail is useful for understanding throughput and accountability. 

3. Creating a Work Order 

• Select the Planner tab in the top menu. 
• Select the + ADD WORK ORDER button in the top-right corner. This creates a WO tile. 
• Erase the “Work Order #” placeholder text and enter a title. 
• Set the WO status, date(s), budget, scope, and projected hours using the dropdowns above the title. 
• Select a contact (or use + Add Contact). 
• Select a project (or use + Add Project). 
• Select the team members for the WO. Only members associated with the project appear as options. 
• Enter any additional information in the notes field. 

Tip: build reusable WO templates. You can duplicate a work order from the three-dot menu on the WO card. Duplicating copies the framework but clears all information except the contact (by design), so you can create per-contact WO templates. Note that site visits within tasks are not duplicated and team members must be reassigned. 

4. Adding Tasks to a Work Order 

Site visit task 

• On the Planner tab, select the work order, then the task toggle. 
• Select + Add Task to create a task tile, and enter a title. 
• Set the task status and date(s). 
• From the site visit dropdown, choose Link existing site visit (to attach an existing site visit) or Create new site visit (then choose a template). 
• Select team members and add a description. The task saves automatically. 

Punchlist task 

• Select the work order, then the task toggle. 
• Select the ^ icon on the right side of the + ADD TASK button, then + Punchlist & Task. 
• Use the table filters to choose which issues to include, then select Continue. 
• Name the task, select team members and date(s), optionally choose a template to merge the issues into, and select Save & Add Task. 

Custom task 

• Select the work order, then the task toggle, then + Add Task. 
• Enter a title, set status and date(s), and – without linking a site visit – add team members and a description. The task saves automatically. 

5. Leveraging Custom Scopes of Work in Planner 

Scope is one of the most useful fields for analytics because it lets you segment and compare work orders by the kind of work being performed – for example, commissioning versus preventive maintenance versus corrective punchlists. SolarGrade lets you define your own custom scopes so they map to the way your business actually contracts work. 

How a scope behaves 

• A scope is assigned to a work order from the scope dropdown when you create or edit the WO. 
• Each scope has a display abbreviation (an acronym) that appears in the Planner table, keeping the table compact and scannable. 

Adding a custom scope 

• While creating or editing a work order, open the scope dropdown. 
• Select the + Add Scope button at the bottom of the dropdown. 
• Enter the full name of the scope (for example, “Preventive Maintenance”). 
• Enter the abbreviation or acronym to be displayed in the table (for example, “PM”). 
• Save the work order. The new scope is now available for future work orders as well. 

Using scopes to track KPIs 

Once your work orders are consistently tagged with scopes, you can use them to answer operational questions: 

• Compare performance by work type: filter or sort the Planner table by scope to see completion, budget, and hours for each type of work. 
• Segment your export: the scope travels with each work order in the CSV export, so you can build pivot tables that compare planned vs. actual budget and hours across scope types in a spreadsheet. 
• Standardize for clean analysis: define your scope list once and reuse it, just as with template naming. A short, consistent set of scopes and abbreviations keeps your tables and exports easy to analyze. 

Putting it together: Custom scopes connect the operational side of SolarGrade (Planner) with the analytical discipline you apply to Templates and Issues. Consistent scopes, consistent issue names, and correct issue/informational categorization are the three habits that make every KPI in this guide reliable.