Ask a seller which financing options they offer and you'll usually get one answer: "we do financing." In practice, SolarMarket supports four genuinely different financing mechanisms, and they do not work the same way at all. Two of them require someone else's approval before they function. Two of them are entirely self-service, with no one checking your numbers before they go live on a real offer. Sellers who don't know which is which either apply for the wrong thing, or configure the right thing badly and never find out until a buyer is confused by a quotation that doesn't add up.

Layer 1 — FI: the only lender-gated option

FI (bank/MFI financing) is the one financing type SolarMarket does not let you switch on by yourself. Before the "Allow bank / FI financing" checkbox on your offer form even becomes clickable, you have to submit a partnership application — business identity, location, product categories, experience, capabilities, and a selection of financial institutions — and wait for at least one of them to approve you. Until that approval exists, the checkbox stays visibly greyed out on every offer you edit, with a message pointing you back to the eligibility page. There is no workaround, no override, and no way to make it work faster except getting the application right the first time.

Once approved, a second layer exists that is easy to miss: the Financing Eligibility page has a separate toggle per approved program, controlling whether that specific program is actually visible to buyers on your store and quotes. Being approved does not mean every approved program is automatically offered — you choose which ones to actually surface, and switching one off doesn't touch your underlying approval at all.

Layer 2 — Hire Purchase: entirely your own math, entirely your own risk

Hire Purchase (HP) looks similar to FI on the surface — a checkbox, a schedule, monthly instalments — but mechanically it is the opposite. HP is your own in-house instalment plan. There is no lender, no approval step, and nothing stopping you from saving a schedule that doesn't actually add up correctly. You configure a down payment percentage, an interest rate, and a term, and the reducing-balance math is calculated for you — but only after you've entered numbers that make sense. A "Quick Fill" tool can generate a full schedule from three numbers (term, down %, interest %), which is the safest way to avoid mistakes, but nothing forces you to use it: you can add rows manually and get the down payment, financed amount, and instalment figures visibly inconsistent with each other, and the system will still let you save.

Layer 3 — PayGo: the option with almost no help coverage until now

PayGo (Pay-As-You-Go) is the least documented financing type on the platform, and it is just as self-service as HP. It models a metered collection schedule: an initial deposit collected at sale, then a recurring periodic amount (daily, weekly, or monthly) for a fixed number of periods. Unlike HP, there's no reducing-balance interest calculation at all — PayGo is a payment-collection schedule layered on top of whatever the final sale price already is (cash price or RBF-subsidised price), not a loan. The main risk here isn't complex math, it's inconsistency: entering a periodic amount and term that, multiplied out, don't actually total the price the buyer thinks they're paying.

Layer 4 — RBF: admin-linked, seller-entered

RBF (Revenue-Based Financing — subsidy programmes like UECCC or EASP) sits in between the other three. You cannot invent an RBF plan yourself; an admin has to link your shop to an already-approved plan. But once that link exists, you are the one who enters the actual subsidy amount or percentage on the offer, and the system shows you a live preview of the "effective price after subsidy" before you save. If the linked plan later expires, the subsidy simply stops applying with no error or warning — it is worth checking a plan's expiry date rather than assuming a subsidy that worked last month still applies today.

Example: fixing a seller account that "does financing" badly

Consider a seller — illustrative, not a real account — who has been offering "financing" for months by which they meant a single Hire Purchase row typed in quickly, with a down payment percentage that didn't match the cash price shown to buyers. They had never submitted an FI partnership application at all, assuming (incorrectly) that FI would activate automatically once they had "enough sales." After correcting the HP schedule using the Quick Fill tool and confirming the Cumulative column matched the actual cash price, and separately submitting a proper FI partnership application with all six sections completed, the account went from one badly-configured self-service option to a properly working HP schedule plus a real path toward lender-approved FI financing — without changing a single price.

What not to do

• Do not assume Hire Purchase is reviewed by anyone before it goes live. It is not — a wrong down payment percentage or interest rate is visible to buyers the moment you save.
• Do not wait for FI to "activate on its own." It only activates through the partnership application and lender approval — there is no other path in.
• Do not leave a PayGo schedule's periodic amount and term unchecked against the actual total price. Nothing in the system verifies that periodic amount × term units matches what the buyer expects to pay in total.
• Do not assume an RBF subsidy is permanent. It is tied to a plan an admin controls the lifecycle of, and an expired plan silently stops subsidising with no alert.

For the exact fields and screens behind each layer, see the detailed seller help guides:

• How Financing Eligibility and the Approved-Programs Toggle Work (Layer 1)
• How to Apply for an FI Partnership, Step by Step (Layer 1)
• How to Set Up FI, RBF, PayGo, and Hire Purchase on an Offer (Layers 2-4)