additional costing boxes for doors

[Forrest Chapman]

When doing alternate door pricing it would be great if there were more price boxes for adding things like finishing that is also calculated by square ft. and per piece. There could be a fill in box for entering a description of charges. These charges will also show up on the price printouts along with the square footage.

Forrest

[Neville Bastian]

In Australia we have a matrix pricing for doors and Drawer fronts rather than the squ foot the US uses. Could that be considered by the programmers if they are going to fine tune this part of the program. I also feel the cost to polish is a valid cost that should be added in. We are fairly fortunate in as much we mainly clear finish but I notice the US has many finishes applied on the doors.
With the cost to finish what would be handy is having this broken down into material used per squ foot or sq meter. Eg per squ meter is .2 litres of polish and 40 minutes polish labour. Thus a 30 door job would go on material list 10 litres of polish required and 8 hrs of labour.
Regards
Neville

[Kerry Fullington]

Forrest,
Couldn't you just add the fixed cost of finishing any door to the fixed cost of building the door and the sq. ft. cost of finishing to the sq. ft. cost of building the door and use those numbers to get your estimates?

Neville,
I think the Alternate Source pricing was intended to estimate pricing of outsourced doors from a vendor and really don't break things down into materials and labor.

I agree that eCabinets needs to be able to calculate materials and labor but I have finally given up on that ever happening. It can calculate materials pretty well but just guesses at labor costs.

[Forrest Chapman]

Hey Kerry,

Yes that is how I'm doing it now. But to keep up with what my charges are I'm having to break down exactly what I'm doing and how much per item. Since finishing can be a multiple step process this can get confusing especially when I drop a step. What I think they can do quickly is add the sq. footage to the printout. It already shows the piece amount. This will help if I need to do a quick pricing of an additional finishing step like if a customer ask "how much to stain that?"

Forrest

[Neville Bastian]

Hi Kerry,
Yes you are right the labour and material costing may not happen. The down side of this not happening is by having a all up price on a door is you almost have to have a excel spreadsheet that you use to work out the true cost of a door namely outside manufactuer door cost, freight cost, polish cost in as much consumables and minute cost to apply the finish. It would be nice to have the materials and labour within Ecabinets otherwise why have it doing half what you need. It would be easier to have it in one program.
I notice Thermwood sell a third party program for doing mdf doors called panlematrix why not get a third party office program that does the quotes, job costing, material ordering, billing etc. Where do you stop. Thermwood just allows the data feeds out for that program. They make a commission on its sale. I guess the down side would be it would be written without any Thermwood user input.

Sorry in a bad mood today as someone cut a sheet of granite the wrong size

Love the new build.
Regards

Neville

[Kerry Fullington]

Neville,

My point is that the improvement needs to be more far reaching than just a finish costing section for outsourced doors. eCabinets needs major improvement in job costing. One of the major reasons in investing time to use cabinet design an manufacturing software is to get an accurate cost estimate from that software. eCabinets does a pretty good job calculating material and outsourced component costs but has dropped the ball on calculating labor costs. The two methods eCabinets uses for labor costs are inefficient and inaccurate. eCabinets generates all the information needed to calculate labor costs but doesn't at present make use of that information.

I am not against the improvement to the Door Drawer Front editor that Forrest mentions in this thread but it just isn't enough. It would fix his immediate problem but in the end still won't give him or the rest of us accurate job costs from eCabinets.

The down side of all this is that if eCabinets did add the necessary means to calculate accurate job costs to the software, most members would not use it as it would require them to provide detailed information about their operation to make it work properly. You must first know all of your costs before you can enter them into the software. This requires some serious time tracking of every operation you perform averaged out over several jobs to be able to get the data you need to enter into the software.

A third party software would be fine but once again most users would not take advantage of it because the estimating software programs I have looked at range from $1500 to $6000 to buy and they too require a great deal of detailed information from the user to be able to calculate costs and then which one do you choose. Every user would want a different program. The best solution is to do it all in eCabinets.

[Neville Bastian]

Hi Kerry,
I guess it depends on where your business is. If you are working by yourself you could just about work it out in your head. The down side is getting too emotional with people. That's why I like the idea of working out the costs with a cold computer than a pen and paper.
I'm sure Thermwood will never supply a perfect estimating program but leaving it in limbo as it is , is not a professional outcome. If we can make a dollar and walk away from non profitable jobs it stands to reason we will have the funds to purchase machinery from Thermwood.
I have tried to get around the labour issue treating it as a material on each cabinet. This works good for me as each deign can have 4 or 5 types of labour minutes. This can be adjusted up and down according to historical records. When I get my material list I also have the labour minutes allowed on my job according work zones.
At the moment I just get my materials and time and manually mark it up. I then have a list of things I need to remember to add in that is difficult to assign to a cabinet but easy for the overall job such as Travelling time,Install time, removal of old cabinets, sink model 1234 etc. The doors I have to manually work out from our Aussie matrix table but Ecabinets does supply the sizes. With some of the materials I ignore the actual squ feet and use the full sheets required especially if its a unique colour.
Once I finish another programming task I'll try and refine this estimating exercise. I have been stalling waiting for you to come up with something brilliant Kerry.
Sorry for hijacking this thread Forrest. Its sort of still on your theme isn't it.
Regards
Neville

[Kerry Fullington]

Neville,

I guess you are misunderstanding me. I want the eCabinets software to calculate accurate job costs. This is probably more important to me "working alone" than it is to a very large shop. I don't produce the volume to be able to "spread out" mistakes and losses in estimates over other jobs. I also have to compete with much larger shops that can manufacture the product more efficiently and therefore at a lower cost than I can. I need my cost estimates down to the last penny. Because of competition my margin is very small.

I don't see the benefit in making these changes in the software one cost calculation at a time (IE adding finishing costs to the door editor and nothing else) This just puts a band-aide on a huge bleeding cut in the software There needs to be a major change in the software regarding job costing.

[Forrest Chapman]

I agree with both of you however what I'm proposing is just an extension of what is already there. The software knows how many pieces there are and what the total sq ft is I'm only asking for this to be extended to a few more entry fields and to be displayed on the cost sheet. I use ecabs to bid most of my work and have worked out a way to use the historical method of 3 times materials. My displayed material cost is not accurate because of this but the end result is good.

Forrest

[Kerry Fullington]

Forrest,

what I'm proposing is just an extension of what is already there.

That is all I am proposing also, only on a grander scale.

Labor costs in any shop have a direct relationship to the materials and components used in a job. eCabinets generates all the information needed about materials to be able to calculate labor costs with some time tracking information provided by each shop.

I use ecabs to bid most of my work and have worked out a way to use the historical method of 3 times materials.

No offense intended but the historical method is just guess work. You will make money on some jobs, break even on some jobs and possible lose on some. Hopefully your average makes you a profit. You can't calculate and maintain an appropriate margin without knowing your exact costs first. Know your costs then add overhead and then profit. Historical doesn't accomplish this.

The other labor calculations eCabinet currently uses (I forget what it is called) might work if you are selling catalog cabinets. Even with that calculating labor by cabinet is a very inneficient way to work.

eCabinets has the potential of being one of the best job estimating software products available.

[Neville Bastian]

Hi Kerry and Forrest,
I am on your wave length. The information we want is in Ecabinets. Getting it out the way we want to see it is the difficult thing. I'm not sure if this is high on their list of must do items hence my ad hoc way of doing it.
Your more likely to get something done than I am as your just down the road from Dale. I have a ocean to get across first.
Best of luck
Neville

[Kerry Fullington]

Neville,

Maybe if we walk a picket line in front of the Thermwood offices.

I am very happy with the method I am using to determine costs other than the fact that I must first draw the job in eCabinets then enter all the information from eCabinets manually to calculate labor.

[Forrest Chapman]

Hi Kerry,

I'm not offended at all because in most cases you would be correct except the majority of cabinets I build are of a standardized nature and have had cost analysis to back up the pricing so what may have started as guess work has been case studied to death. As I have said my material prices entered usually do not reflect the actual cost of the material but may be more or less depending on the application. My hardware cost for instance is the cost of the item plus a markup plus a fixed amount to install total divided by 3. Enter that amount and the software triples it and I have my selling price. Maybe I have oversimplified it but it has worked for me and I routinely compare my prices with my Dads who uses another software regarded to be the best on the market with seemingly endless calculating ability.

Forrest

[Kerry Fullington]

Forrest,

Nothing I do is standardized so that really complicates things. What I am hoping for in eCabinets is job costing that works, so you don't have to use any of the workarounds that you currently have to use.
You would only need to keep your material cost information up to date in the software and provide the time information for performing the various operations it takes to build cabinets. This would give you the job cost and from that you can add overhead, profit, perceived value and pain in the butt markups. Once you are confident in your cost on a job it allows you to really compete in tough times.

This is one of the most important things that a cabinet manufacturing software should do.