Estimating software for machine shops: an honest look at the options

Search for estimating software for machine shops and you get listicles assembled by people who have never quoted a part. Almost nobody in this category publishes a price, which makes comparison shopping a series of phone calls with salespeople. Here is what we found, including where our own tool does not fit.

First, the honest question: do you need any of it?

Among small US manufacturers, roughly a quarter quote from spreadsheets and another quarter do it by hand. That is not ignorance. If you quote three jobs a week and you have been doing it for twenty years, a spreadsheet you trust beats software you have to feed.

The honest test is not how long quoting takes. It is whether you know, after the job ships, if the price was right. If you have never compared what you estimated against what the job actually took, that is the gap worth closing — and it is a gap a spreadsheet cannot close on its own, because nothing ever writes back into it.

The categories, and who each one is for

What actually kills these implementations

Read enough shop owner forums and the same three failures come up, none of which are about features.

• ·Data entry. The system wants every machine, material, routing and rate loaded before it produces one useful number. Owners describe spending months and giving up, sometimes after five figures. If a tool cannot give you something useful on day one with partial data, the odds are against you finishing.
• ·Per-seat pricing. Charge per user and the shop rations logins; ration logins and the floor stops recording anything; once the floor stops recording, the estimates never improve. It is a chain, and it starts at the price list.
• ·Nobody on the floor uses it. If recording time means walking across the shop to a terminal, it will not happen consistently. The shops that succeeded either put the entry point where the work is, or gave up and went back to paper.

If you are evaluating anything, the question to ask the salesperson is not what it does. It is: what does a shop of my size have to load before this produces a number I can use? Then double the answer.

Where our own tool fits, and where it does not

Spindlerate is built for shops under about twenty people. It starts from the opposite end of the data problem: instead of asking for your rates, it asks for a handful of jobs you already quoted and what you charged, and works backwards to the hourly rate you have actually been selling at. That takes about twenty minutes and you have not entered a machine yet.

It reads a photo of a drawing rather than requiring a CAD file, it prices assemblies rather than one part at a time, and after you close a job it replaces the estimate with the time it really took. One price per shop, everyone included.

It does not invoice, it does not schedule your week, it is not a CAM system beyond turning, and it will not help you at all if the honest answer for your shop is that your spreadsheet is fine. If you quote two jobs a month, keep the spreadsheet.

How to evaluate anything in this category

• ·Ask for a price before a demo. If nobody will give you one, that tells you the price is negotiable and therefore high.
• ·Ask what the minimum seat count is. Several vendors have a floor that makes them absurd for a shop of three.
• ·Ask whether it is an annual contract and what the cancellation notice is. Auto-renewal complaints are common.
• ·Get the implementation timeline in writing, then ask what happens if you stop halfway.
• ·Load one real job during the trial — a job you already quoted and already ran — and see whether the software would have told you what you now know.