A cut list tells you what to buy. It does not tell you what to charge.
Cut-list and optimiser tools work out parts and sheet yield. PlankCAD takes it from there: what the job costs once labour, waste, overhead and margin are in, and what the customer sees.
Cut-list and nesting tools do a specific job well — turning a parts list into sheet layouts and material quantities, so you buy the right stock and waste less of it.
What they stop short of is the commercial side. Material quantity is only one input to a price; labour hours, shop overhead, waste allowance and a target margin decide whether the job is worth taking.
Cut-list software: it optimises material
Parts in, layouts and quantities out. Focused on yield and buying, not on what the finished job should be sold for.
PlankCAD: it prices it
Four tools in one workspace. A deterministic estimator: you enter the costs your shop actually pays — materials, hardware, labour hours and rates — then apply waste, overhead and a true gross-margin target. A quote builder that issues that estimate as a customer-ready PDF, freezes the payment terms it was sent under, and keeps a revision history of what each customer was actually told. A cut list and sheet optimizer that nests those same parts onto your real sheet sizes with kerf and grain respected. And an offcut rack, so what one job leaves over is stock on the next.
Where the two differ.
| Dimension | cut-list software | PlankCAD |
|---|---|---|
| What it produces | Sheet layouts and material quantities | A priced estimate, a customer PDF quote, and a cutting plan |
| Cost lines | Not its job | Materials, hardware and other costs, each with quantity, unit and unit price |
| Labour | Not its job | Entered as hours against an hourly rate, shown separately |
| Waste & overhead | Tracked by hand, if at all | Applied as explicit percentages you can see and change |
| Margin | Spreadsheet, usually | True gross margin — profit over selling price, not markup over cost |
| Output for the customer | A drawing or model | A PDF quote with scope, line items, tax, total and terms |
| Runs in | Desktop application | Any browser |
When cut-list software is the right tool
- You need optimised sheet layouts to cut from.
- Your question is how much stock to buy, not what to charge.
- You already have a costing process you trust.
Using both
They complement each other directly: take the material quantities your optimiser produces, enter them as cost lines here, add labour and overhead, and send the quote.
PlankCAD and cut-list software.
Nothing, for simple work. The limitation is that a spreadsheet holds no geometry — it records dimensions you derived somewhere else and cannot check them. PlankCAD nests the parts onto real sheet sizes with your kerf and grain direction, so a part that will not fit is caught before you are at the saw rather than after.
Yes. Cut lists export as CSV, so the numbers land back in the spreadsheet you already use — the difference being that they came from a model that was structurally checked before producing them.
Both. Dimensions are normalised in millimetres internally and can be displayed and exported in either system.
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