Your lumbers costs can be entered by board foot (BF) or linear foot (LF). While many sellers of lumber have multiple ways of providing pricing of their lumber to you, you will need to enter your costs based on BF or LF.

 

The majority of crating companies use BF.  When selecting BF as your 'Tracking Level', your reports will include usage by both board foot and linear foot. This is often the preferred method for ISPM15 reporting. However, if selecting LF as your ‘Tracking Level', your reports will only provide linear foot usage.

 

Attached is an XLS spreadsheet to easily convert linear foot costs to board foot costs.

 

Entering different lengths of lumber into Crate Pro


Crate Pro is prefilled with lumber materials which include actual and nominal dimensions, average waste % and cut times. The different lumber lengths are not included in the ‘Item ID ‘field in the upper section. The Item ID field is how the material is shown on your cut lists. If you enter the ‘length’ as part of the Item ID, staff will assume that’s the material to be used even though using different lengths would be better for waste calculations.

 

Crate Pro does not determine yield optimization so including the length would not be beneficial. The cut list will simply display the material to use (1x4 versus 2x4) and the total length required for each component. It will be up to staff to determine what length materials to use based on what you purchase, have in stock and what may be used from your ‘waste’. You may also export a report from within the Design> Details > Pieces tab that can then be imported into you own yield optimization software.

 

 

You do have the ability to enter the same material with multiple lengths. An example might be to enter 1x4x8 and a second material 1x4x12. Or as many as you wish to represent the different lengths you purchase.  However, when creating designs, you as the designer will have to select the Material Group that contains the desired lengths or manually change each field in the Design to the material you want used. This is rarely done as the time to determine in labor this far outweighs any cost benefit you might gain.

 

Why do some companies create multiple records of a material? 

  • When you have a different grade of wood which needs to appear on cut list
  • When you’re using a different wood: Yellow Pine versus Oak.

 

While the cost per BF or LF may be different based on the length, it’s not always significant enough to justify creating a second material record due to reduction of your ROI (return on investment) by increasing labor time. Doing so just for the difference in cost per BF or LF would again require staff to determine and provide to the designer which length boards were used and then for the designer to make those changes in the design. Most companies will enter the lumber at the higher cost.

 

Why am I able to enter lengths in Level C through Level F?

 

The lower section, Level C through Level F are NOT for entering lumber costs for the purpose of costing material use in the Design module. In this section you may enter the length of the boards you purchase, apply a markup for the purpose of selling this material directly from Inventory in the PROJECTS module.