How it works

What the optimiser actually does with your cut list, in plain language. For a field-by-field walkthrough, see the guide.

What this tool does

You give it two things: the cuts you need and the stock you can buy. It works out which cuts to make from which lengths so you buy as little as possible.

The hard part: even a small job has millions of possible ways to group the cuts, and most waste material. This tool searches those combinations properly instead of grabbing the first decent-looking answer.

Kerf and end trim

Every cut eats a few millimetres: the kerf. Plan a tight job without it and the last piece comes up short, so every plan here allows one blade width between cuts.

Rough or painted ends? Trim both ends takes one blade width off each end of every length first.

Offcuts

Offcut rows are lengths you already own. They're free material: used whenever that saves buying a new length, left on the rack when it doesn't, and the plan tells you which was which.

Five ways to optimise

Buy the fewest lengths, waste the least material, use up your scrap first, set up the saw fewer times, or spend the fewest dollars. Same engine, your call, and Compare shows them side-by-side.

What the green tick means

Before searching, the engine works out the minimum amount of stock that could ever cover your cuts, no matter how cleverly they're arranged. If the plan it finds hits that minimum, then by definition nothing can beat it.

Best possible plan means exactly that: not this tool's best guess, but a result that met a provable mathematical floor. Not any other tool, or a person with a notepad and a week of spare time, can use less stock for those cuts.

When the tick doesn't show, the plan is still the best one found in the time budget, and the result says the most it could possibly be off by: usually zero or one length, on big complicated jobs.

Every plan is double-checked

Before a plan reaches your screen it is re-checked from scratch against what you typed: every cut appears exactly once, every layout physically fits its length with kerf and trim included, and no offcut is used twice. A plan that failed that check would be refused, not shown.

Under the hood

The engine is our own, built from scratch for exactly this problem. Most free tools grab the first decent-looking plan and stop; ours keeps searching for better ones, and can mathematically prove when no better plan exists. How it does that is our secret recipe.

Typical jobs solve in well under a second. Huge lists get up to a few minutes, and every plan is checked before you see it.

The same engine is available as an HTTP API for your own calculators and ERPs: see API access.