Furniture Calculator — three hours down to fifteen minutes

Mistakes
surfaced
at purchasing

The order lived in one spreadsheet shared by everyone. The manager wrote down dimensions from the client’s words, the estimator costed from the same sheet, the director added the markup on top — and nowhere in that chain was the data ever locked.

The costliest error was not a complex one but a plain typo in millimetres: it was noticed once the material had already been ordered. And costing a simple wardrobe took the estimator two to three hours.

What makes it hard

Costing a wardrobe by formula is not hard. Fitting that calculation into the workflow of people used to a spreadsheet is.

01 · Managerbuilds the request: dimensions, materials, drawings

→

02 · Sentthe request is frozen and leaves the manager’s list

→

03 · Estimatorprice from the workshop’s price listcost price and markup are visible only here

→

04 · Excela familiar file that can be tweaked anywhere

01

Once sent, it does not change

While the request is a draft, the manager edits it freely. Once sent, it goes to the estimator and disappears from the manager’s list. “Costed on one set of dimensions, ordered on another” becomes impossible by the very design of the program.

02

Not everyone sees everything

The manager sees what the order consists of but not the purchase prices or the markup. Each role has its own screen, and it was built that way from day one.

03

The price calculates itself — honestly

The program takes dimensions and materials and calculates the price from the workshop’s own price list. If dimensions are missing or a material is unknown, it leaves the field empty. An empty field gets noticed and queried; a plausible but wrong number does not.

The outcome

A working prototype shown to the client: the manager builds the request, the estimator gets a ready costing, and the output is a familiar Excel file that can be tweaked anywhere.

15 min instead of two to three hours to cost a simple item — the goal the whole thing was started for

2 roles with their own screens: the manager builds the order, the estimator costs it; the director’s markup comes in stage two

4 drawings can be attached to each item — the estimator sees at once what the client meant

Built with: Next.js, Supabase, Tailwind, Excel export.
Stage one of two: testing the mechanics with real people · next on the plan is reading dimensions straight off the drawing · my role: requirements, prototype, demo.