Building a Solar Leasing Company Around Its Tax Credit
Residential solar installer and its new leasing company | Fractional CFO: entity setup, financial systems and bookkeeping controls | February 2026 to present
At a glance
The situation
The homeowner solar tax credit ended with 2025. Offering a credit now took a separate company to own leased systems and claim the commercial credit, and there wasn’t one.
Once that company was running, its books had two problems:
- payments meant for the installer were landing in the leasing company’s bank
- in July 2026, after a bank-feed reconnection, duplicate entries doubled construction in progress, the cost basis for the credit
What we did
Setup (February to May 2026)
- Worked through the structure with the client’s tax counsel, then formed the leasing company
- Built its chart of accounts, accounting system and revenue recognition
- Set the credit method, with credit tiers tracked by class of system, and built an asset register
- Wrote the bookkeeper’s standard operating procedure
Cleanup (August 2026)
- Read the accounting system’s audit log and traced the misrouted payments to a merchant deposit setting
- Wrote a 6-stage cleanup plan and a schedule of misrouted receipts
- Tied out the balance between the installer and the leasing company
Results so far
- Cost basis. Construction in progress was corrected from $1,980,626.58 to $1,004,577.29 in August 2026.
- Misrouted payments. 22 payments meant for the installer, $87,093.00 gross, had landed in the leasing company’s bank. $85,843.00 net is owed to the installer.
- Intercompany balance. On August 7, 2026, the payable between the installer and the leasing company tied exactly to $117,826.24.
- Books built for the credit. The bookkeeper’s procedure was final at version 4.0 in May 2026. By September 2026 the asset register held $2,561,151 of system price.
How we measured this: the figures come from the company’s accounting system, its audit log, bank records and asset register; the engagement is ongoing, so the results are those achieved so far.
What it means
A tax credit is only as good as the cost basis behind it. Books built around the credit from the start meant a doubled basis could be traced to its cause and corrected before it reached a return.