Estimate how much moulding your shop wastes every month — and what cut optimization could recover. Takes 30 seconds.
Enter your monthly moulding spend. We'll compare your current waste rate against an optimized baseline and project the savings.
Cutting waste from 22% to 12% over 12 months.
RailChop Business is $24.99/mo. Your numbers above estimate roughly $300/mo in recovered material at the rates entered.
Anything you pay for but don't sell. Every offcut too short to use. Every remnant that sits on the rack past its useful life. Every miscut. Every kerf of sawdust. Waste isn't just what hits the floor — it's any material that flowed through your receiving door and didn't flow out in a finished frame.
Most shops don't measure this. They buy moulding when they're low and reorder the next time they're low. The gap between "moulding purchased" and "moulding that left as finished frames" is invisible unless you track it. For most shops, it's 20% or more.
Based on published framing-industry discussions and shop-owner interviews, typical moulding waste rates break down like this:
| Shop Profile | Typical Waste | Band |
|---|---|---|
| Hobby / DIY framer | Cuts one order at a time, no remnant tracking | 25–35% |
| Small shop, no system | Jots cuts on paper, buys fresh sticks when running out | 22–28% |
| Small shop with batching | Groups orders by profile when convenient | 18–22% |
| Medium shop with spreadsheet | Tracks cuts in Excel, eyeballs layouts | 15–20% |
| Shop with POS cut calculator | Uses POS-integrated simple cut planner | 13–18% |
| Production shop, dedicated optimizer | Cut optimization software with remnant tracking | 8–12% |
| Best-in-class | Full optimization plus disciplined remnant aging | 6–9% |
Numbers are ballpark ranges based on industry discussions and shop testing. Your actual rate depends on frame-size mix, moulding variety, and shop discipline.
Unused offcuts. The single biggest source. Every frame produces offcuts. If the offcut is longer than your minimum remnant length, it's salvageable. If it's shorter, it's waste. Most shops don't track this because the offcuts get tossed in a bin and forgotten.
Remnants that go stale. Second biggest source. A remnant saved this month is useful. A remnant that's been on the rack for 18 months through three moulding-catalog changes is waste. Shops that save remnants without aging them often end up with $2,000 of dusty stock that nobody will ever use.
Miscuts and redo's. Cutting to the wrong dimension happens. Bad math, misread work order, wrong blade setup. Each redo is the original cut plus the correction, doubling material for that frame. In shops without digital cut plans, miscut rate can be 3–5% of jobs.
One-order-at-a-time cutting. The sneaky one. If you cut each work order independently without looking at the next order, you're almost guaranteed to leave a 40" offcut on every stick. Across 20 orders a day, that's 800" (67 feet) of material left on the floor.
Every cut that doesn't share a stick with another compatible cut is a missed packing opportunity. Every remnant that isn't consulted before a fresh stick gets pulled is double-buying material. Every misread work order compounds.
RailChop fixes all three at once. It packs cuts across every order in your batch. It consults every remnant before recommending a fresh stick. And it gives you a PDF cut ticket so there's no misreading.
It's an estimate based on your monthly moulding spend and your self-reported waste rate. The only way to measure your actual waste precisely is to weigh or measure every offcut for a month — which almost no shop does. If you want a tighter number, RailChop's Shop Dashboard (Business tier) tracks your real waste rate per batch, per profile, and over time.
22% is a common starting estimate when you've never measured. Most shops underestimate their waste by 5–10 percentage points because the remnants on the rack feel like "assets" but mostly end up as waste. If you've never tracked, you're likely above 20%.
Yes, with discipline. 10% is what production-framing shops with dedicated cut optimization software and active remnant management consistently hit. Getting below 10% requires aggressive remnant aging, batching orders across multiple days, and tight inventory control. Most shops plateau at 10–12%.
Because a human, cutting one order at a time, almost never finds the arrangement that uses the fewest sticks. With 20 cuts across 3 profiles and mixed stock lengths, the number of possible packings is in the millions. An algorithm evaluates those combinations in a fraction of a second and picks the best one. A human picks the first one that looks OK and moves on.
RailChop is on the App Store today. Every new install starts with a 14-day free trial of every Business feature (scan caps apply during the trial).
We’ll email you when the Android app is live. No spam.