Pricing a job
Materials, labour, waste, overhead, and the margin that decides your price.
Every cost goes in with its own quantity, unit and unit price. Materials, hardware and anything else are separate lines so you can see what is actually driving a number, and labour is entered as hours against an hourly rate rather than buried in a lump sum.
Waste is applied to materials only — not to labour or hardware — because that is where offcuts actually come from. Ten per cent is realistic for clean sheet goods; twenty to thirty is closer to the truth for rough-sawn stock.
Overhead is applied on top of the direct job cost. It is the rent, power, insurance and tooling the job has to carry, expressed as a percentage of what the job itself costs you.
Then margin. This is the one that catches people out: PlankCAD uses gross margin, which is profit divided by the SELLING price, not markup on cost. A 30% margin means selling at cost ÷ 0.7, not cost × 1.3 — the second earns you noticeably less. The estimator shows the markup equivalent next to the field so the difference is visible while you set it.
The totals are deterministic. The same inputs always produce the same numbers, every time, on every device.
Cut lists and sheet optimisation
Turning priced parts into a cutting plan that respects grain and kerf.
Parts can be typed in directly or imported from CSV — the importer accepts common column names and reports each bad row rather than silently dropping it. There is a template header on the import screen if you would rather start from that.
The optimiser nests parts onto your real stock sizes, respecting saw kerf, grain direction and edge banding. Grain outranks rotation: a part marked along-length will not be turned to save a few millimetres.
The result is a diagram per sheet plus a parts list, and it can go back out as CSV.
The offcut rack
Reusing what you already paid for.
Anything the optimiser leaves over can be kept as stock rather than written off. The rack tracks what you have, and later jobs can draw from it before adding to a purchase list.
This is the part that quietly pays for itself. Most shops know they have usable material somewhere and buy a fresh sheet anyway because finding out is harder than reordering.
Quotes and revisions
What the customer was told, kept exactly as it was told.
A saved estimate becomes a numbered quote against a project. Marking it sent is an explicit action — downloading the PDF never marks anything as sent, because printing a copy to check it is not the same as a customer receiving it.
Changing the price creates a NEW revision. The previous one is marked superseded and stays downloadable forever, carrying the payment terms and validity it was issued under. Re-downloading a quote from last year prints last year's terms, not today's — that is the whole point of keeping it.
An accepted quote cannot be revised. The price is agreed; a further revision would imply it is still moving.
Trials, limits and what happens after
What the free tier caps, and what a trial lifts.
New accounts get fourteen days with the paid limits. There is no card involved and no charge at the end — when the window closes the account simply returns to the free tier.
Nothing is deleted when a trial ends. Every estimate, quote and revision stays exactly where it was. The free tier caps how many NEW estimates you can save and how many projects are active at once; it does not take anything away.
You can export your data at any point, on any plan.
Something not covered here, or not behaving as described? Tell us — the gap is usually in the documentation rather than in you.