How to work with Estifex.

This page is the whole manual — how the tool works from the inside. Anyone who wants to know how the sum is done before making an account can read it here: without signing in and without a demonstration call.

Once: set up the workshop

My profile. Name, address, VAT number, bank, currency, logo and the line with your own terms that stands under every offer. The VAT rate and how many days an offer stands. All of it goes onto the paper the customer reads.

Materials. Timber by m³, sheets and veneer by m², each with your rate. Board thickness. And a defect percentage per material group — empty means it is not counted, not zero per cent.

Positions. Everything that is not material: machining by the minute, sanding by the hour, dowels by the piece, packaging, freight. Named once, they are in every calculation.

Customers. Name, registration number, VAT number, address, country, contact person. And the offer language, if it is not yours.

Then, for each estimate

1. Customer, product, quantity. Pick the customer from the list rather than typing the name — otherwise two spellings become two customers.

2. Parts. Every part is one row: name, shape, how many go into one product, material. Set the shape by hand as a run of segments — straight, turned, tapered, round with one flat — or drag in the drawing of the whole product and it is read off. A whole set goes in at once; nothing is written down until you have looked at every row. The material is never read from a drawing — on most drawings it is not there at all.

3. If a part is too thick, the row says so and asks how it is glued: in the thickness or across the width. Until there is an answer that row does not go into the price, and the estimate says so in words rather than staying quiet.

4. Everything else. Positions with their own unit and quantity.

5. The price. Overhead per cent, the prototype multiplier and profit per cent. The order is a rule: overhead on materials plus positions, then the prototype lifts the cost, then profit on that cost.

6. Two papers. A cutting list for the workshop and an offer for the customer.

What to show the person at the saw

The cutting list has: how much timber one product takes, then per material how many pieces for the whole run, what to cut them to, the finished part or the drawing’s own blank as the lower limit, and the notes — turned, glued in the thickness, glued across the width, sheet, +defects. The cut size may be reduced; below the last column, never.

What Estifex will not do

It will not invent a board. It will not read a comma as the end of a number. It will not write anything into a stock record. And it will not call a draft approved.

The rest of the family

Estifex is a Vivifex tool. The same paper, the same ink, the same refusal to guess a number nobody has stated. Tarafex answers packaging data once and keeps the answer. Kubifex runs material accounting for a workshop with a certificate. Formifex is the manufacturing operating system, fitted to any manufacturer. Estifex holds the price — and none of them registers you anywhere.