Faster, More Accurate cabinet quotes: how CABINET VISION helps you price jobs with confidence

G’day! I’m Clayton. This is the Planit Canada YouTube channel, and welcome back to another CABINET VISION tutorial.

To win a project, you need to quote a project. And here at Planit, we understand that that whole process, it needs to be accurate and it needs to be fast. Not only can CABINET VISION draft up a project, not only can it optimise for the CNC, but it can also produce those accurate and very quick estimations or quotes so that we can focus on winning projects as quickly as possible.

So what we’ll do today is we’ll talk about how pricing works in CABINET VISION. There are really two fundamental areas, so we’ll look at both of those, and let’s get into it.

Costs in the Material Manager

So in CABINET VISION, all of the pricing, all of the quotes and estimates, they begin here on the System Level. What we do is we tell CABINET VISION, this is the cost of our materials, what it costs us to purchase these materials, and that acts as the baseline, the foundation for our quotes. And then later on, we’ll add on the profit, the markup, the tax, whatever it may be in addition.

But we need to tell CABINET VISION how much it’s going to cost us to purchase these materials and use them. And then later on, we can add on the labor and the profit.

So all of the settings for our material costs are under the Material Manager, the library of all the different materials we have. And you’ll notice on all of these materials here, I’ve got these fields on the right-hand side which are related to the cost of that material.

Now, generally speaking, as a bare minimum, there are about two or three settings here we want to make sure are accurate. The first one is the unit of issue. So logically, the unit of issue, we want it to reflect the way that we purchase and the way we want to quote this material.

So for my panel stock materials, I want the unit of issue to be per sheet, whereas you’ll notice under the edge banding folder here that the unit of issue is being calculated per foot. So whatever value I put in here for the default cost is going to factor in the unit of issue.

So that’s the first column we want to make sure, the first setting we want to make sure is accurate. I’ll go back to my panel stock materials.

The second is the default cost. So this is the cost of this material for us.

This is that foundational value that we want to put here in CABINET VISION.
Now at the moment, let’s say I made that $100. I’m saying to CABINET VISION, “every time you use this material for each of those sheets, it’s going to cost us $100”.

Now I’ve put in the $100 here. At the moment, the default cost is not associated with any particular vendor, brand, or mark. So what that means is, regardless of where the material is coming from, CABINET VISION is going to use this cost, this value here.

If I wanted CABINET VISION to be set up so that, depending on the brand, depending on the company that I purchased this material from, I’m going to get a different cost to work with. You’ll notice at the vendor at the top here, we’ll have our vendor library, the vendor manager, where we can create new vendors and start filtering different costs according to the vendor.

So you’d set them up here; you’d click on New if you want to add different vendors to this list. And then these settings here can reflect later on in the reports, just to make it a bit easier.

So if I double-click on this material under the ID section here, I’m just going to get the material properties just for this material. When I click on vendors, you’ll see that I’ll get that list we just saw. And let’s say I just bring a couple over.

Now I’m telling CABINET VISION I could technically purchase this material from these two vendors. This is their reference number. So this can be useful for whoever’s going to be ordering that project later on to make sure that they’re purchasing the right material.

And then under the cost here, I can put in the two different costs that I might technically have with each of these vendors. And I could also add a specific markup for each of these different vendors as well.

In CABINET VISION, all of the different prices, all of the different costs that we’re adding in here- these different values- everything will stack. So if I were to put a markup here, even if I just put in, say, 5%, later on in my Bid Center, I will still be able to add in a markup for the whole project that works for my profit. It will also add on top of this the 5% for this particular vendor.

So just keep that in mind. All of the values you put in here, they’re going to stack; they’re going to accumulate. So it’s not like you override any of that pricing. What I’ll actually be doing is just adding to it.

Now, there are some pros and cons to setting up different vendors like this. At the moment, with this material, let’s say I’ve got these two vendors here. You also see I’ve got the current default vendor. So I can toggle between these different options. I can change this later on in the Bid Center. But this is the default, is what I’m saying.

When I click Close and save it and then return, the default cost is now at 100. Beauty!

But the other side of this is that because I’ve gone down to a more granular level, a lower level, we could say that’s more precise. I now can’t mass update the default cost field here.

So let’s say these were $150. Then I could, in the bottom corner here, highlight that field and drag it down. And I could update the price for multiple materials at once.

But what you’ll see is I can’t click on this default cost now. I’m currently clicking on it. So here I can click on it. I can make changes to it. But here I can’t. That’s because there are two different values at the moment that it needs to factor in. So it doesn’t want me overriding it here.

So what I’d have to do is I’d have to go back into that ID, go under vendors, and then have to update these costs here. So just keep that in mind.

This is more accurate, and it can give us a lot more flexibility later on during the quoting process. The other side, though, is that if we need to update a lot of different prices, a lot of different costs to us, then I would have to be going into individual materials to be updating that. And I couldn’t necessarily update the price here and then just drag it by relevance.

So just keep that in mind. That’s just a personal preference thing.
That third setting we just want to highlight as well is the waste setting here. We probably want to make sure that we’re happy with this before we’re ready to start quoting jobs.

That’s because generally it’s nearly impossible that we’re going to 100% economically use up all of the material that we order. So this setting here is saying I’m going to factor in that we might be losing or wasting about 15% of this material when I estimate how much of the material I’m going to order.

So this can help us be more accurate, or give us a bit of breathing room, a bit of a buffer, as we’re going to start quoting the materials we use in our project.

But at the moment, for my panel stock, this is set at 15%. My edge banding- that’s another good example is set at 5% because we’re going to lose a bit of edge banding every time we run a panel through the edgebander.

Or maybe when we need to replace a part, we’re going to use up more of that panel than we had anticipated. We’re going to use up more edge banding than we anticipated. So this little percentage here can just give us a bit of breathing room so that we’re not exactly running these materials at a loss.
That said, you can come up with your own percentage that you’re comfortable with and update that here, of course.

So we’ve got those three settings here: the unit of issue, that default cost, and this waste setting here. Now, once you’re comfortable with those, you probably could start developing your quotes in the Bid Center of CABINET VISION.

The reason why I haven’t gone into too much detail with, say, this sell price here, this default markup, they aren’t necessary. What we’re doing is we could be saying to CABINET VISION, on top of the markup I’m already going to do in my project later on with a rate table, I want you to, in addition to that, add another 5% markup whenever we use this material.

So if we just want to have more precise control over the markup, the cost, the price, on an individual material-by-material basis, not just later on in the bid centre being put on top of our cost, we could definitely set that up here. It’s not going to be critical for everyone, but you might find that it is necessary for you.

So in the Material Manager, set up those foundational costs, get those values in here.

Just another trick for you as well: let’s say I’ve got all these different materials, but they’re different sizes, they’re different types of materials, they’re probably not all going to have a similar cost.

If you would like it slightly easier for you as you’re setting up the pricing in CABINET VISION and easier for you to maintain accurate costs in your material manager, you might find it more advantageous to add in different folders here and sort the different panel stock materials by different categories, but predominantly by the way they’re going to be priced.

So what I mean by that is, let’s say I grab a couple of three quarter materials here, now if I know for a fact that these materials here are all going to have the same default cost and the manufacturer vendor sends me a little letter that says, “look, we’re updating our cost, you’re going to see a 5% increase”, what I could do now is instead of me having to go through one big folder trying to go, ‘oh, okay, so that one needs to be $100, that one needs to be $150…’

I could have this folder here, and I go, ‘Ok, everything in here is going to see a 5% increase; I know that. Now I could just maybe remove the vendors from here so I can actually show you what I wanted to do.

So I’ll go in here, and I’ll just remove these vendors, hit close, and return.

But now, if there was some sort of increase and I knew that all of the materials, all of those panel stock materials in this folder, are going to be the same price, it just might be easier for me now to update them.
But that’s just something to keep in mind: you might find that personally more useful to you rather than trying to update heaps of different materials one by one or trying to sort through them; you could use folders just to make that a tad bit faster.

Great, so imagine we’re happy with this, we’ve got all of our materials set up, let’s just create a new job and let’s talk about how CABINET VISION then starts adding in profit and markup on a job-to-job basis.

So I’ll just open up a new job, I’ll add in some walls, and then go to Elevation and let’s add in some cabinets; of course, you’ve probably drafted up your project so far.

How Rate Tables Work

Now, to go to the Bid Center, I’m going to click on Reports and Bid Center. CABINET VISION will scan through that job, work out what’s involved, and it will start to give me some pricing.

Now let’s talk about the second fundamental part of pricing a job: quoting a job in CABINET VISION. So we take those material costs that we set up in the material manager, and we use rate tables to start factoring in the profit, the markup, and the tax on top of that.

So you’ll see there’s a little rate table section at the top here; we click on that, and I’ll just click on the setup button here so we can see what this cabinet and installation rate table is doing.

So rate tables, they’re basically a list of methods for how we would like to calculate the cost of the materials and then the markup we would like to make on top of that.

So you can see, under this cabinet and installation, I’m saying I want you to include in this rate table 100% of that material cost, great. And now I want you to put a 20% markup on that, and I want you to factor in that there’s going to be a 13% tax, for example.

We can also, then, on top of, say, the method here, which is a percentage of the material cost, we can add specific values, but at the moment, this method is saying that for all of my base assemblies, I want you to add a value of $20 per base assembly.

And when I click on the little drop-down menu here, you’ll see we get a whole bunch of different methods that we can create and add in our own rate tables.

If you wanted to create your own rate table, you can just click on the little new button here, let’s just call this one test, click Ok. Now I get a completely blank rate table, and I can start to, let’s say, just do materials as we saw before.

I can say I want it to be doing 100% of material cost and the markup. So I could start to create my own custom rate tables; maybe the way I price a commercial job, I would like it to be slightly different to the way I price a residential job.

So I could create different rate tables for different occasions, and I can use the different methods we see in here to start calculating a quote for the client.

Now, if I want to, I could also, as you saw, if I click close there, I can use multiple different rate tables. So I could work out, just like we’ve got here, a rate table for cabinet and installation, one for laminate countertops.

You’ll see, I’ve also got a rate table for paint finishing. So I’m working out a value for the primer, the top coat, the clear coat. I’m using a per square foot of the finished area within this job.

So this is the kind of thing where you can have a play in here and make sure that you’ve got these rate tables set up so that they are adding in the markup, adding in the profit you would like.

And you could, of course, if you wanted to take an existing rate table and then you could copy it, and maybe I’ve got now a cabinet and installation for a commercial job and a cabinet and installation for a residential job.

Or maybe we’re working with particular builders, and we want to give them slightly better rates, for example.

So we could have different rate tables here for any kind of situation.
Just quickly, I’ll add, if we want to add in, for instance, new headers, you’ll see there’s like a little new group section here, and now I can put in my own name for that. So if I just want to neatly organise it.

How Labor Tables Work

What I will also show you is that if we close our rate tables and we go to the view mode, we go down here to labor. And if I click on this little button here, I can also set up a labor rate table that will be associated with the individual, for instance, assemblies with the individual roll out and how many minutes I associate with that particular object.

And then how I would like the method I would like CABINET VISION to use to come to a price to add on top of that.

So we’ve got rate tables; we’ve got labor tables there as well.

Now, there are a couple of other techniques I’d like to show you as to how we can add in custom prices for cabinets to our projects. But before we do that, let’s close this. I’m going to go back to view mode and then bid breakdown.

Important Bid Center Settings to Check
We can open this up, and I just want to show you that there is a way that we can set up CABINET VISION to structure these bids before we start exporting them, printing them to present to clients.

Under the options here, when I click on that, I can set up a default marker, a default deposit here for all of our projects. That’s an option for us.

You’ll see under show and hide, I can also click on this setting here: show price lines that are zero. This can be really useful because if I’m checking the bid and there is something set at $0, which I know there shouldn’t be, so it sets off some alarm bells for me, I can double-check what’s going on with the material pricing and fix that so that we don’t accidentally underquote a project.

And another really useful tool is the grouping setting here under this option. Here, I can tell CABINET VISION how I would like to group my projects, whether it’s beginning with the room and then by the catalogue and then by the door style, or however I might like to organise it.

So you can play around with these different option settings here to make sure that the bids or the quotes that you’re exporting are presented the way you would like them to be.

I’ll also add that if you want to go through these options in detail, it’s always useful to open up the help files under Help Topics here. And then, with the little open up, if I search a particular setting- so I’ve got estimate sheet; I just searched, and then I click on options- you’ll see that here is a following list of the tabs in the Bid Center options area.
And it’s a list of all of those different settings we’ve looked at and exactly what they do. So if you want to make sure that you can take advantage of all of them, if you’re a little unsure of what that setting should be doing, you can set that up here.

The reason why I open this up is that I wanted to just highlight this here: the estimate sheets of material. So that’s under those options that we saw here, where there was that estimate sheets by material setting.

When we have this turned on, we’re asking CABINET VISION to use a generic panel optimisation to work out an estimate of how much it’s going to need to order. This is going to give us a more accurate idea of the cost of this project. And so the quote that we dish out as well will also be more accurate.

So it can be a really good idea for us to make sure that setting is switched on. And the help topics here also talk about some of the limitations. So you can work out whether you’d like to use that estimation or not.

There are a couple of other tips I just wanted to share with you as well about how we can add custom pricing to our projects.

Custom Object & NGA Pricing
You saw under the rate tables how we can add a custom value to our base cabinets, for example, or our upper cabinets- all of those cabinets that appear in our project.

Well, what we could also do is, maybe we’ve got in our object catalogue a particularly custom, a particularly unusual cabinet. I’ve seen sometimes customers will have, say, a LeMans cabinet that has been saved to their object catalogue with that hardware.

Maybe there’s a little bit of extra mucking around with this cabinet when we’re assembling it. And we don’t think that the standard generic base price will cover all of the work that we’re putting into this particular cabinet itself.

We can, if I right click on a cabinet and then go to properties, we can also put in our own custom price and our own custom labour for an individual object in my object catalogue.

So if this was that custom cabinet, I could put in my price here. Then if I save this back to my object catalogue with those settings, I will be able to know that that’s covered in my bids, in my quotes when I’m working on them.
The other really useful tool I wanted to show you is if we go to the objects catalogue and I’m going to click under the custom cabinets folder here and then accessories, you’ll see I can create, if I right click on this space and then add accessory, a non-graphic accessory.

So a non-graphic accessory, it’s an object that’s technically in my job, but it’s invisible. It’s not necessarily doing anything. And this can represent custom prices as well.

So let’s say we’re working on a project and we just know that this particular job is going to be a real hassle to deliver. There’s something on site; it’s just going to be a bit of a pain.

I could put in a special delivery fee, for example. Here I could make that price, I don’t know, let’s just say $1,000, click Ok.

And then I can click and drag this, place this in my room. And if I were to go to my reports, you’d see that while I couldn’t see that object I’d added in there, it’s now here. And when I go and develop that quote for my customer, CABINET VISION will add in that $1,000 on top of it.

So you can see I’ve reopened that bid centre report and the special delivery fee has been included in that quote now.

So how did you go with all of that?

Conclusion
Clear as mud?
You will probably find that it’s just going to take a little bit of time for you to make sure you put in those costs. It’s probably the kind of thing where it’s going to take a lot more time at the start, and then it’s just going to be maintenance to keep it up and make sure those costs are reflective of what you’re actually paying.

In our next video on this topic, we’re going to talk about how we can create these reports, modify the quote so that they are neat, presentable, and professional. We’ll talk about the different settings that you can control there.

If you have any questions based on what you saw, understand there are a lot of different settings there that you could use if you would like. So if you have any questions, let us know in the comments below, and we’d love to help you out or create more tutorials like this.

We’ll see you in the next video.