Sawgrid › Offcut inventory
Leftover stock
Offcut inventory that the optimizer actually uses
Every workshop has the rack: the half sheets and long strips too good to bin and too awkward to remember. They are only worth anything if the tool that plans the job knows they exist and reaches for them first.
The offcut inventory is a Pro feature. Calculating stays free.
An offcut is just stock with three properties
Sawgrid does not have a separate offcut mechanism bolted on. A leftover is a stock panel like any other, and it carries three things:
- A size. The real width and height of the piece, not a rounded guess. Type it in whatever unit you measured it in.
- A quantity. Offcuts are finite by definition. A fresh sheet from the supplier can be set to unlimited; a leftover cannot, and the app enforces that.
- A priority. A plain number. Lower is consumed first. Give the rack a lower number than your fresh sheets and the optimizer will empty the rack before it cuts into a new panel, even when that costs a little utilisation.
The packer has known about several sheet types since the first line of code, which is why this costs the optimizer almost nothing. Retrofitting an offcut rack into a solver that assumed one sheet size would be a rewrite.
Utilisation is not the goal, and that matters here
An optimizer told only to maximise the percentage used will sometimes ignore your rack, because a fresh full sheet packs more neatly than three odd leftovers. That is the right answer to the wrong question. The material in the rack is already paid for.
The priority number is how you say so. It is a consumption order, not a hint, and Sawgrid honours it whatever it does to the utilisation figure.
What comes back out of a run
Usable leftovers produced by a plan are drawn on the cutting map with their real dimensions and reported separately in the area balance, so you can see exactly what the job hands back. On the plan on the home page that is one piece of 982 by 240 mm, 4.1 % of the sheet, which goes into the rack rather than into the bin.
The sliver rule
The temptation for an optimizer is to count every strip it leaves behind as a reusable offcut, because that makes the waste figure look wonderful. A 1.5 mm ribbon is not stock. Nobody can hold it against a fence.
So there is a minimum offcut width, 50 mm by default. Anything narrower is booked as waste, not as stock, and it shows up in the waste line of the balance where it belongs. Set the minimum to what your machine and your patience will actually take.
Honest about the limits. This is a list you keep by hand. There is no scanning a pile with the camera, no measuring from a photograph, and no shared rack across several devices or several people, because Sawgrid has no account and no server. The offcut inventory, the one that carries across projects, is a Pro feature; a free project can still describe offcuts as stock inside that one project.
Bars and profiles too
Linear stock works the same way. A bar flagged as an offcut carries a low priority and is eaten before a full length is opened, with the same finite quantity rule and the same closed accounting. The linear page covers it.
Measure the rack once
An afternoon spent typing the rack into Sawgrid pays for itself the first time a job comes out one sheet lighter. Leftovers carry a size, a count and a priority, and the optimizer eats them before it opens a fresh panel.
iPhone and iPad, iOS 17 and later. Free to download.
Keep reading
The rest of the arithmetic behind a cutting plan.