How a sales manager or inside sales team at a lumber yard uses LumberSet day to day

It is Thursday afternoon at the lumber yard, and a builder you want to keep has just emailed twelve sheets of drawings with "need a price by Monday" in the subject line. If you run inside sales, or manage the people who do, you know what happens next: the drawings go to the one estimator who counts, behind three other jobs, and you spend Friday promising a number you do not have. Here is how that Thursday goes for an inside sales team at a lumber yard that uses LumberSet, step by step, with the arithmetic shown.

Thursday, 2 pm: create the project and upload the drawings

Find the customer, or add them, and create a project for the job: one site, one builder. Upload every PDF the architect sent, not only the floor plan. The framing plan, the sections, the details and the schedules carry the wall heights, header sizes and hanger callouts, and a takeoff that reads only the floor plan has to guess at all of them.

Then walk away. Reading every sheet into a building model takes a while, and the takeoff is then checked by a LumberSet reviewer, an estimator on our staff, who records every correction with a reason and the sheet it came from. Whether that review happens before the takeoff is released to you (gated) or after (audit) is a setting your owner chose when the yard was set up; how a lumber yard owner sets up LumberSet covers that, along with estimating standards and the catalog. Either way there is nothing for you to watch, so take the next call at the counter.

Open the takeoff and check the low-confidence elements first

When the takeoff opens, do not start at line one. Every element read from the drawings (a wall run, an opening, a beam) carries a confidence, and the low-confidence ones are where reading was least sure, so that is where your first five minutes go. Click one and its evidence shows the sheet and the region it was read from.

Say the first one is a second-floor exterior wall read as 8 feet high, and the building section on A4.1 says 10 feet. Change the height on the wall and watch the lines move. In this example the wall is 32 feet long at 16 inches on center, so its layout is ceil(384 / 16) + 1 = 25 studs, and that count does not change. What changes is the stud itself: 25 precut studs at 92-5/8 inches become 25 at 116-5/8. The sheathing for that wall goes from 32 x 8 = 256 square feet, 8 sheets, to 32 x 10 = 320 square feet, 10 sheets, before waste. The plates are unchanged. The arithmetic on each line updates with it.

A header works the same way. If the schedule calls for a 3-1/2 by 9-1/2 LVL over the 6-foot slider and the takeoff read it as two-ply 2x10, change the header on that opening. The header line moves from dimensional lumber to LVL, and if your estimating standards double the jacks over six feet, the jack count on that wall moves too.

Match to the catalog and price with your margin

Each takeoff line names a material the way the drawings do, for example 2x10 No.2 at 14 feet. You match it to the item in your catalog that fulfils it, with your SKU, unit and price. Two quantities show on every line: net, what the drawings need, and order, net plus waste packed into the stock lengths your yard carries. You price the order quantity.

In this example a floor has 65 joists at 13 feet 6 inches, so the line is 65 pieces of 2x10 at 14 feet, because nothing shorter reaches. Your catalog carries that item at $21.00 a stick, and you price this customer at cost plus 20 percent: $21.00 x 1.20 = $25.20, so the quote line is 65 x $25.20 = $1,638.00. The margin is yours to set, and the line keeps the count that produced it.

Send the quote, then re-price when the builder calls back

Send the quote as a link and a PDF, branded with your yard's name. The link is what the builder opens on site; the PDF is what goes in their bid file. On Tuesday the builder calls: can you do better on the sheathing, and they want the interior walls in 2x4 after all. Change the material on those walls, re-price the lines that moved, and re-send. None of that is charged. A takeoff is billed once, $200, when it is released, and corrections, re-pricing and re-sending are free.

Revised drawings are different. When the architect issues revised sheets after the takeoff was released, upload them as a change order on the same project. It runs as its own takeoff and shows what changed against the released one: lines added, lines removed, quantities changed. You re-price what moved, not the whole house. A change order carries a change order fee of $100.

Keeping inside sales quotes consistent across the lumber yard counter

The quiet cost of one-desk quoting is that two salespeople quote the same drawings differently. One carries 10 percent waste on studs, the other 5. One doubles the top plate, the other assumes the framer will. With the yard's estimating standards driving every line, two people at the counter get the same quantities from the same drawings, and the difference between their quotes is only the margin each chose.

It also changes what happens when a builder questions a number. "Why 32 studs on a 24'-6" wall?" used to be answered with "that is what we always send." Now you open the line: layout 20, corner 2, partition 2, two openings at four studs each, 32 in total, read from the framing plan on sheet A2.1. The builder can see the same sheet. How to count studs walks through that exact wall.

From a phone at the counter or in the yard

Nothing is installed, so the same workspace opens in the browser on your phone or a tablet. That matters at a yard more than in most businesses, because the question comes at the counter or beside the truck, not at a desk. Look up a quote, check a line's evidence, or send the link while you are standing with the customer. Owners, managers and estimators each have their own login, with no seat licenses, so nobody shares a password to get at the quotes. If something does not behave, the Help Center has articles and a help assistant, and you can open a ticket or request a call from any page.