Shop Dashboard
Your shop's performance at a glance. KPIs, waste trends, cost savings, material usage — with monthly PDF reports and CSV data exports. Business tier.
Your shop's performance at a glance. KPIs, waste trends, cost savings, material usage — with monthly PDF reports and CSV data exports. Business tier.
The dashboard pulls from every optimization your shop runs. It tracks total moulding consumed, waste generated, optimization scores (how efficiently each batch was cut), material usage by profile, and cost savings versus the industry baseline. All of it updates automatically — there's no manual entry, no export/import loop. Run a batch through the cut optimizer, complete it, and the dashboard reflects it within seconds. Your numbers are always current.
The main dashboard view opens with a hero metric card (typically total linear feet purchased this month) with a sparkline showing the trend over the past 30 days. Below that, a KPI strip shows four key numbers at a glance: total moulding consumed, total waste, average optimization score, and cost savings. Tap any KPI to drill into a detailed chart or data export.
Most frame shops think about moulding cost per foot purchased. You buy a profile at $6/foot, and that becomes your cost. But waste changes the real story. If you run 20% waste on that profile, you're not actually using $6/foot — you're using $7.50/foot. That's your True Production Cost: the effective cost per foot including waste overhead.
The dashboard calculates True Production Cost per profile so you can see which mouldings are actually expensive to run, not just to buy. A profile that costs $4/foot to purchase but has high waste overhead (30% scrap) becomes much more expensive per productive foot than a $8/foot profile with tight waste (8% scrap). This metric breaks down by profile so you can see exactly where material dollars go and identify which profiles to stock more carefully or prioritize for optimization.
RailChop's savings tracker compares your actual waste to a typical manual-cutting baseline (drawn from industry discussions and our own early-testing observations). Every percentage point of waste your shop drops below that baseline translates to a dollar figure — per month, per year. The dashboard shows you the cumulative savings month-to-date and projects annual savings if the current pace continues.
Here's what makes this honest: reused remnants are counted as zero-cost in this calculation. They were already paid for in a previous batch, so using them in a future job doesn't subtract again from your savings. This means the savings figure reflects genuine waste reduction and material efficiency, not double-counted material. If you reuse remnants effectively, you'll see that reflected directly in your cost savings — because you're genuinely cutting waste, not just shuffling numbers.
Set an alert threshold per profile. When stock drops to or below the threshold, a badge appears on your home screen and the profile is highlighted in the dashboard's material tab with a bell icon. Tap any flagged profile to go directly to the inventory screen and manage restock. The alert threshold is set per-profile — you decide what "low" means for each moulding based on your reorder lead time and stock strategy.
For example, if a supplier takes two weeks to deliver and you run through $500 of a particular moulding per week, you might set the low-stock alert at $1,200 to give yourself ordering time. For a slow-moving decorative moulding, a much lower threshold makes sense. The system respects your business logic instead of applying a one-size-fits-all rule.
The dashboard's Materials tab shows a breakdown of which mouldings you've consumed this month and what percentage each profile represents of your total consumption. A visual breakdown by dollar value helps you spot which profiles are driving your material costs. The Waste Trend chart plots your waste percentage week by week over the past 90 days — you can see if waste is improving over time, trending up (a sign to review recent batches), or staying consistent.
Optimization Score tracks how efficiently each batch was cut. Higher scores mean tighter nesting, less waste, better use of remnants. Watching this trend tells you if recent work orders are easier to optimize or if cutting conditions are changing (new profiles, mixed stock sizes, etc.).
Generate a monthly shop report PDF: a printable summary of the month's optimization activity, waste stats, top profiles by volume, True Production Cost breakdown, and cost savings versus baseline. Perfect for reviewing with partners or keeping for your records.
Export CSV files for your own deeper analysis or to feed into accounting and supplier conversations. Three export types: material usage (by profile, with costs), waste trends (weekly data for the past 90 days), and stock inventory (current levels, alert thresholds, total value). All exports are named and dated automatically so you can track them over time.