A spreadsheet will price the part. The yard sells a board.

The usual file has a column for length, a column for width, a column for thickness, a rate, and a total. That is the finished size, or a blank guessed by eye. It does not know that 23 mm after the planer is a 32 mm board. It does not know that a sheet is bought 10 mm over. It will let you send the same chair at two prices because nothing mints a number when the paper leaves.

Estifex is not “Excel, but nicer”. It is the rule the yard already uses, written once, applied to every line, and refused where the yard would also stop. The offer the customer holds does not contain the costing. The copy that follows an issued paper does not reuse the number.

If you quote ten chairs a year and you already know the board, you do not need it. If you have sent the same stool at two different cubic metres because the last file and this file disagreed, you already know the cost.

What the market actually sells

• Cabinet CAD/CAM — Cabinet Vision, Microvellum, Mozaik They design kitchens from a parametric library and drive a CNC. That is a different job from working out which board a turned leg is cut from, and a chair is not a carcase.

• Workshop management suites Jobs, stock, timesheets, scheduling — the whole shop, with estimating as one module among many. If you want one system for everything, that is the shape to look at. Estifex does one thing.

• AI quote writers They turn a sentence into a tidy PDF, and on site that is genuinely useful. But none of them knows that 23 mm after the planer is a 32 mm board, so the paper looks right and the volume underneath it is not.

• Cut list optimizers Sheet nesting and plywood takeoff, and several of them are free. They are the right tool for casework. They are silent on solid timber: no planing allowance, no sold thicknesses, no glue-up, no defect grade.

• Free volume calculators They give the volume of the piece you typed in. No allowance, no sold thickness, no customer, no offer and no number on it.

• Estifex €89 a month. The board the yard sells, the paper the customer holds, the win rate of what actually left. Not stock. Not CNC. Not a kitchen library.