Book Keeping?????

[Eggsander]

Not exactly a fun thought, but as stacks of lumber are starting to accumulate around me a bit faster thatn they use to, it occurred to me that I should really start writing this stuff down so I can keep track of what I've got.  :-/ I started jotting it down in a notebook, but that doesn't provide much of a useful tally. How do you go about recording what you've sawn? I started trying to put it down on a column pad but thought I could shorten up the process by asking here first. :P

[woodmills1]

every cut day i tally at the end on whatever sheet is handy.  next day or so i transfer to my ledger book.  at the end of a job my totals are already recorded in the ledger which is good cause it is hard to create numbers after the fact.

[psychotic1]

Don't know much about bookeeping itself, but I can say that microsoft excel in the ms office suite (whatever year) is an extremely powerful spreadsheet program.  Can be a little hard to learn, but the tables/graphics and charts can be extremely usefull and enlightening.

Bruce

[Tom]

There is so much of the wood stacked here at the house that I remember cutting,  I quit recording "MY" wood years ago in favor of marking the boards with the saw date.  

It always amazes me to pick up a board from a stack from 5 or 6 years ago and remember the tree, the lot and the face of owner of the tree.  I wouldn't be able to do that in RonW or JeffB scenario but I guess it comes with the custom cutting territory.

The production inventory of my portable custom cutting business is kept on the bill that I present to the customer.  It has their name, address and phone, the types of wood I cut, quantities of Board Feet and. Numbers of dollars.  That is a chronological report of what I did for the year and is kept on a two copy, carbonless, 4x7 inch, commercially available, invoice pad tht I get from the local business supply store.

The trouble with keeping records is trying to determine the information that will be pertinant down the road.  I tend to grossly overdo it and then the paper is worth nothing and I just wasted a lot of time.

For instance, I tried to keep track of each band blade, the sawmill maintenance, and all that stuff that "corporate" requires operators to keep, thinking that big business must know what has to be done.  I soon found that it was more important to change the oil in the engine than worry about when I did it last so I just started writing the date on the filter to be sure I didn't forget one day,

I tried to record the band when I bought it, the amount and type of wood I cut with it, the length of time it was on the mill, the set, how many times it was sharpened and from whom I purchased it.  Now I just keep an extra box of 20 blades so I don't get caught short, take a blade off the mill when it's dull, set it to 21 thous., sharpen it and use it again when its turn comes. All that other stuff wasn't doing me a bit of good when all I wanted was a sharp blade. It was taking a lot of hours out of the day and frustrating me  that I couldn't write "everything" down because there was just too much.  Heck, I found I could remember most of what I needed to know anyway and the blades life was short enough that it just wasn't a problem.  If I need to keep information about a blade, like tooth damage or special set,  I write it on the inside of the blade with a Sharpie and when I use the blade again it gets erased by the band wheels.

With wood inventory its not the shelf life that's important so much as having the shelf.

Keep It Simple S_ _ _ _ _  :D

[Ron Wenrich]

I sub-contract and get paid only on production.  I've been using this method to figure production for the past 30 years, and it works pretty good.

I do piece counts where all the sizes are the same.  For random width lumber, I do layer counts.

To figure production, I take the mill count at the end of the day, and add what has been taken out of the mill, then subtract my beginning mill count.  Seems to be fairly accurate.

To do this in your lumber yard, start with a beginning inventory, then add or subtract lumber as it goes into the yard or out.  You can take an inventory every couple of months to see how well your yard numbers come up against your computed numbers.

I've used MS Works spreadsheet.

[Eggsander]

Ron, that's just what I had in mind for the process. By layer count on the random widths, do you mean to count the layers in standard dimension stack (say 6' wide by 10' long or whatever).
Tom, I hear what you're saying. I'm not trying to make this any more complicated than it has to be. As of now, the lumber I'm producing is for my own use, for the house or for furniture I build. Since everything I've cut until now at least is from trees I've cut off of projects we've worked on or other sites around the area I've always known where each piece of lumber came from. When I build a piece of furniture, I record on the bottom when and where the tree was logged. Now the lumber goes into the stack quite a bit faster and I can see my mental inventory getting discombobulated, so I thought I'd better start recording each days production. This would also give me something of an inventory at a glance without having to sort through the stacks.
What I was looking for was a format someone might use in a ledger book, which could also work in a spreadsheet on the computer as well. Nothing I was jotting down seemed to quite do the trick.
S----- is as S----- does   :D

[Tom]

Steve. have you been talking to my wife?  Maybe Charlie is letting the cat out of the bag.  That S_ _ _ _ _ is as S_ _ _ _ _ does is her favorite saying.  :-/  She is tellling me that all the time and now everybody else is too :-/ :D

I've also been told, for some reason, that only Idiots smile all the time.  

[Jeff]

Testing
Stupid
 :D

[Tom]

          YO !

[psychotic1]

 ??? ???
HuH??  Somebody call me?

[Ron Wenrich]

To do a layer count, we just measure the width of the layer, and deduct a little for air space.  Depending if it is dead piled or stickered.  Then multiply by the length/12 to come up with the volume per layer.  Multiply volume and the layers to come up with pack volume.

We use it for rough computation for figuring how much we need for a load and how much I saw.  When graded, it comes pretty close to what we figure.

The other figure I watch is downtime, and what caused it.  I know that I will lose 1 weeks sawing each year due to trash metal in the logs.  If I take the estimated mill costs/minute, I know that I lose about $5000/year due to metal.  Pays for a metal detector rather quickly, but management doesn't see it that way.

I also can see how much a piece of equipment costs in repairs vs letting it remain.  If a new piece of equipment or a redesign can be paid off in 2 years in savings, it is well worth the money to replace it.  Time is a non-renewable resource.

[Kevin_H.]

I stick all boards as they come off the mill, When I get one layer done I will stop and measure BF and grade each piece, then I write this info on the end of the board with a marker, so that when someone comes to buy they already know how much they are getting. all this info is put in a ledger each day.
Stopping to grade and measure takes a little time but not as bad as going back and handling each piece a 2nd time.

[Eggsander]

Tom I get that a lot too. One thing about smiling all  the time though is it sure makes everyone else wonder what's going on.
Thanks Kevin H, recording something on the board would in keeping track of things, like keeping boards from a certain log together for bookmatching, etc.