Solar EPC project tracking runs on the 10/70/20 payment schedule

A 10/70/20 payment schedule is where solar EPC project tracking turns into real cash flow, not a plan on paper. The first instalment is small — 10% at booking, enough to show the customer is serious and to fund the site survey. The last is ceremonial, 20% after commissioning, once the entire installation is working. The 70% in the middle is where every month either comes together or falls apart.

The 70% arrives at your bank account between two moments: the moment the customer commits to the structure design, and the moment your materials ship. It is the payment that decides whether you dispatch this month or hold it in the workshop another week. And when it does not land, everyone else waits.

Why solar EPC project tracking needs payment gates

A rooftop solar project moves through 15 working stages before it is complete. In the early stages (document verification, site survey, loan application) the money sits with the customer because no part of the system yet lives on their roof. Then it reaches structure dispatch, the moment materials can leave your workshop and move to the site.

At structure dispatch, something real changes. You have bought steel, mounting brackets and wire that will not fit anywhere else once they are made. Your logistics team has blocked a truck. Your electrical team has reserved their time. The customer's roof is being prepared. Structure dispatch is the point where, if the payment does not land, you are holding a made-to-order asset the customer may no longer want to take home.

The payment gates exist because they answer one question for every role that sits between the sale and the installation: can I move on, or do I wait? A project cannot advance to structure dispatch until the agreed share of the money has arrived. A project cannot advance to material dispatch until the larger share arrives. And a project cannot be marked complete until 100% is collected — not because the customer owes it then, but because your reporting depends on knowing what you actually own.

What the 70% means in different project types

Not every solar project is the same risk. A project funded by a bank loan has a different cashflow pattern than one the customer self-funds. A subsidy-eligible project has yet another.

For a project with a loan, the 70% gate is set at 65% of the sale value. The customer has already committed to taking on debt. The bank has approved the amount. The 65% is the point at which you have enough security to start the costly part of the work, ordering materials for delivery, booking the logistics network, and authorising your installation team to book their own calendar time on this job. The remaining 35% follows in pieces as the loan is disbursed and as the customer pays the mandatory balance at milestone moments, sometimes at net-meter activation, sometimes after.

For a non-loan project, the 70% gate is set at 95% — not because the customer is less trustworthy, but because the risk is inverted. A customer paying cash all upfront does not have a bank to fall back on if they fall short of money at the last moment. The 95% gate forces the conversation: do you have the last 5%, or does the project pause here? It is not a punitive rule. It is a line that says: if you have a liquidity crisis, it matters that we know now, not on the day the net meter arrives.

Neither gate means the remaining money is optional. It means the remaining money is known — it has been committed, and it stays committed, and you have sight of it on the horizon.

The 70% decides whether your month closes

For an EPC owner or operations head, the monthly targets are stated in kW installed and rupees collected. You publish these to your director and your team each month, and they matter — they feed the forecast, they show whether hiring has paid off, and they signal whether the business is sustainable.

The 70% payment controls when materials move. Materials that do not move do not get installed, and installations that do not happen do not generate the commissions that bring crews back next month or close the projects that bring collections home. When the 70% sits in a customer's account, every other project in the queue behind it slips one week because your workshop and your trucks are both blocked.

On a month with twenty projects moving through the pipeline, a handful of 70% payments arriving five days late does not look dramatic on its own. But every one of those five days is money sitting in a customer's account instead of yours, and every day it sits there is a day your workshop and your trucks stay blocked on a project that cannot move without it. Miss that pattern on three or four projects in the same week and a target you were on track to hit turns into one you missed by a small, avoidable margin.

This is not a quirk of one company's paperwork. It is how solar project delivery works: you do not have the money to move the project, so the project does not move.

How the 70% gate protects you and the customer

It is tempting to push the money deadline back, to ask for less upfront, or to shift the full balance to the very end. It is also how material gets dispatched against unconfirmed money — the cheque bounces three weeks later, your materials are on the customer's roof, and now you own both sides of the problem.

The payment gate sits between you and that mistake. It says: I will not dispatch materials until I have cash in hand. And it does this automatically, on every single project, so the pressure to bend the rule, to send materials anyway just this once, never lands on a tired person at the end of a hard week.

The same rule protects the customer. A customer who has not yet confirmed their final payment does not yet want your entire material set arriving at their house. The 70% gate means materials move when the customer is ready to receive them, not when you are ready to dispatch them. It spreads the risk evenly: they commit to buy, you commit to supply, and materials move only when both sides have confirmed their side of the bargain.

Tracking the 70% in your workspace

The 70% is not a figure that lives in a spreadsheet or a WhatsApp message. It lives in your project data — in the stage the project has reached, in the amount that has been collected against the amount that was promised, and in whether the payment gate for this project's next move has been cleared.

When the 70% payment is collected, the project automatically advances to material dispatch. The project does not wait for someone to remember to update a spreadsheet. It does not wait for someone to be asked. The moment the money lands in your bank account, the gate is open, and anyone watching the project knows it.

This is how software can help you run the schedule that you already know works. Every project you have ever run carries an implicit 10/70/20 payment schedule, because the schedule is written into the physics of delivery: you cannot put materials on a roof that you have not been paid to put materials on. Solar Spine brings that schedule out of the implicit and into the visible, so the 70% payment moves a project forward automatically instead of requiring someone to chase it through the system. It does not collect the payment for you, and it will not call a customer who has gone quiet — it only alerts the collection owner and their manager each morning that the money is overdue, so a human still makes the call.

The platform lets you configure your own payment gates too. The 65/95 split between loan and non-loan work reflects the terms of the EPC we built it with, not a mandate. If your business runs different gates (perhaps 20/60/20, or a different split for subsidy-heavy work) you set those once during onboarding and every project to come will run against your own terms, not that default.

Every rupee due on delivery sits in one place, beside kW installed, loans disbursed, and net meters activated. The owner's monthly close takes one look at that single screen instead of a week of chasing six people for status. You step in for the exceptions. The month that is left is for growing the business.