Does Your Company Need An App?

Custom Cabinet Planner is not meant to remain Custom Cabinet Planner, it's meant to become your company's app. You change the name, add your logo, and invite your clients and team members into YOUR APP.  ​

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Custom Cabinet Planner is a Cabinetmakers Single Source of Truth

The objective of this app is for everyone to know what to do and when to do it. Knowing the right next thing to do is empowering, knowing when to do it is what makes a company more money now and in the future.

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A Second Brain


 
The human mind is an amazing thing, but we simply cannot remember everything we want to remember, so we store things to reference when needed, and this is the place to STORE those things.


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Are you sick and tired of being late on your projects?

Are you sick and tired of projects being delayed because of missing selections or specifications?

Are you sick and tired of all the chaos around you?

“If you have two half-finished projects, it adds up to zero finished projects.” 
-Unknown 

"Lots and lots of WIP (Work In Process) is my secret to success," said no one ever. The secret to success is getting things done. The secret to good cash flow is finished projects.

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G-T-D

Empowering Custom Cabinetry Manufacturers to Get. Things. Done.

What Custom Cabinet Planner is !

Right up front, you need to know that Custom Cabinet Planner is NOT MRP (Material Requirements Planning) or ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software. Although Custom Cabinet Planner does a lot of the same things, this is simply my attempt to pass my Organizational Skills to cabinetmakers who want to get their ducks in a row, stop wasting money and time, and deliver their projects on time. 

Custom Cabinet Planner is NOT design software, although the name has been interpreted that way by some. If I had to shuck it down to a single word, Custom Cabinet Planner is all about Managing. It's about managing your projects, managing your clients expectations, managing what your team works on and when they work on it, managing your preconstruction processes, managing your manufacturing processes, and managing your delivery and installation processes.

Dave Ramsey of Ramsey Solutions is famous for saying, "You will either manage money or the lack of it will always manage you". Something similar can be said of your projects. You will either manage them or they will always manage you. If you are tired of fighting fires, and ready to start preventing fires, Custom Cabinet Planner is the perfect tool to help you achieve that goal.


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Custom Cabinet Planner WON'T:

Save you from your sin

Cure your Male Pattern Baldness

Eliminate your Gynaecomastia

Improve your Libido

Build "The Wall"

Make you too sexy for your shirt

Custom Cabinet Planner MIGHT:

Improve your Cash Flow

If you use the Good Profit piece as intended

Optimize your Punch Lists

If you utilize the Punch List part well

Manage Customers Expectations

If you use the Projects page as intended

Improve your On-Time Delivery

If you manage the Delivery Shedule well

Improve your Health

If you use the Daily Tech Triggers part as intended

Increase your Wealth

If you use the application as intended

Custom Cabinet Planner WILL:

Set your team up for success

Put specifications at your fingertips

Enable KANBAN inventory management

Remove the chaos

Get your team on the same page

Enable a paperless shop

FAQ's

These terms of service ("Terms", "Agreement") are an agreement between the website ("Website operator", "us", "we" or "our") and you ("User", "you" or "your"). This Agreement sets forth the general terms and conditions of your use of this website and any of its products or services (collectively, "Website" or "Services").

Notion is the Swiss Army Knife of cloud-based databases. It's strength lies in it's "Building Block" (think LEGO) interface, where you can mix all sorts of elements on a page, and utilize the power of databases to do WORK.

No. Custom Cabinet Planner exceeds the limitations of the Free plan, so you will need at least the Plus Plan. If you have a Team, you can use the Plus plan, and invite all your team members and clients in as guests (this works very well), but if you give all your team members a company email addresses with your companies domain, Notion will assume when you invite them into Notion that you are wanting to upgrade to Notion's Business plan (the upgrade will happen right then), and you will be paying the per user subscription cost for each and every team member. Some will want this as there are access controls that will be beneficial.

If you don't want to move up to the Business plan, a reasonable work around is to make a free gmail account for each team member, make that email forward to their company email, and then invite them into Notion using their gmail address, and have them log into Notion using their gmail address. This will limit your Notion subscription cost to a single seat per month/year (Notion is an incredible value for what you get).

No. Notion is a cloud-based system that as of 05/14/2024, does not have an offline feature.

Start with simple things like:

  1. Entering Companies (Builders, Remodelers, Designers, Architects, etc.)
  2. Entering Contacts (the people at the Companies above, and your homeowners)
  3. Entering a Project and all the appropriate data on the Project page (open the toggle for each of the numbered steps and enter all the data you know)
    1. Make sure to choose a Room Status (this controls the position on the Production Schedule board)
    2. Enter the Rooms for the Project in the Project Setup and Location area
    3. Make sure to enter a Proposed and Actual Delivery Date (the Actual Delivery Date is what makes a Room show up on the Delivery Calendar)
  4. Use these Project pages as your Single Source of Truth (so everyone knows what everyone else knows)
  5. Once you have a few good Projects entered, and have used the app successfully, start looking at utilizing the Procedures pages
  6. As you work through the Procedures, add, edit, and delete as needed, make them your own
  7. Once you have your Procedures pretty well sorted, then start Looking at the Team pages, and start utilizing the To-Do-List and Goals
  8. Keep exploring, and exploiting the many features of Custom Cabinet Planner until you have it all working like you want

If used as intended, you should find the chaos in your plant subsiding, and in time, everyone should know what to do, and when to do it.

Absolutely! When the good times are rolling, and we feel short on hours in the day, being able to provide a Ballpark Estimate can save untold hours of our precious time.

I used to hate Ballpark Estimates! It seemed like everyone wanted one, but if I gave them my best guess at what their project might cost, they latched onto that number like a dog with a bone, and would not let it go (why is this Estimate so much more than your ballpark number?). Then I stumbled upon the idea of a Ballpark Range. For years, I tracked job sales price and cabinet quantity on my Delivery Calendar. Doing this, I was able to create three multipliers based on my total sales and number-of-cabinets-sold data from the previous year, giving each client three numbers (a range) rather than just one number. 

I had always tracked my cabinet quantity, so for me, this was a pretty easy thing to develop. But for many of those I consulted, that was not something they tracked. This app will help with that. This process is simply looking at all your sales dollars for the past year, and divvying them up into a low, average, and high multiplier based on your least expensive per cabinet cost project for the past year, your average of all projects per cabinet cost for the past year, and the most expensive per cabinet cost for the past year. Don't get me wrong here, you don't have to wait a year to start using the Ballpark Estimate, you can enter your own numbers if you know them, or use the numbers in the seed data included with the program until you know your own numbers.

This process eliminated the latching onto a number issue I dealt with early in my career, and serves two purposes extraordinarily well. First, it pre-qualifies your client. Can they afford your cabinetry? And second, it saves some sales as some people, having no idea what things cost, will choose things they can’t afford during the selection process. By providing a Ballpark Estimate prior to providing a formal Estimate based on their selections, these three numbers will inform them that there are other selections available that would lower their cost. Prior to this Ballpark Range calculation, I would usually lose these potential clients as they would just go to a competitor and make better selection choices.

Phases are intended to provide you with the ability to break larger projects into smaller bite-sized pieces (to protect CASH FLOW). The heading for the Phases column has two question marks in parentheses when you receive the template. Those question marks should be replaced with the number of cabinets you would like to produce; a weekly number for larger shops with a team and weekly payroll, and a weekly or monthly number for smaller one-man shops.

For example,  let's say your target weekly production is 40 cabinets (and all the other things that are needed to deliver and install 40 cabinets), so you would replace the two question marks with the number 40. Now your objective would be to create Phases that have as close to 40 cabinets as possible, so as you assign a Phase to a Room, it will be grouped into that Phase and you will see a cabinet count at the bottom of the column for each Phase.

A couple of things to consider when breaking a large project into phases is to save the pass-through public spaces for the last phase as these areas like Kitchens, Mud Rooms, Butler's Pantries, etc., where lots of people, especially other sub-contractors are passing through, and often with ladders, trim, and other things that can damage your cabinetry as they attempt to get to other areas of the home will typically lead to damage. Another thing to consider is to get all peripheral rooms with Plumbing as early as possible to allow other sub-contracts to move on with their part of the project.

I think Phases are one of the secrets to success in our industry as they break big jobs into smaller billable segments of a job to keep your Cash Flowing in just as though you did multiple smaller projects.


In the Procedures section of Custom Cabinet Planner, each Procedure (a procedure/process that is included in your SEQUENCE OF EVENTS) includes three sections, Setup, Process, and Maintenance. Think of these like this:

  • Setup- What do I need to do BEFORE I do this Process?
  • Process- What is it that I need to actually do?
  • Maintenance- What do I need to do after I have completed the Process?

In the Maintenance section, there is a portal that allows you to change the Room Status and the Assignee. Every Process is typically done by someone or someone's, so changing the Room Status is a signal to someone that the "Ball" is in their court (if you are responsible for finishing, and the Room is moved into the Finish status column, then you know the "Ball" is in your court), but no Notification will be sent based on that change. The Assignee field however will generate a Notification to whoever is entered into that field (you can enter more than one Assignee when needed), and thus CLEAR and CONCISE instructions are sent telling the Team Member that the "Ball" is in his/her court.

The objective here is that everyone knows what to do, and when to do it.


Yes and No. In terms of tracking paid time for each Team Member, the current answer is NO (I feel like everyone already has a way of doing that, and that is typically integrated with other software like accounting), but it is certainly possible and would be quite easy to implement if someone wants me to do that for them, or attempt to do it themselves.

As far as tracking Process Times, the answer is YES. Not only does Custom Cabinet Planner do this, I think the way it's done was God Inspired. For each and every Procedure, there is a 'Clock In' button at the top of the page and a 'Clock Out' button at the bottom of the page. The objective being that 'Clocking In' and 'Clocking Out' would be context sensitive (the buttons are part of the process itself, the first and last of many steps, and HARD to miss).

By tracking Process Times, we learn our TAKT time for each of these Processes, which helps us to better predict how long a Project will take, and thus be able to provide more accurate Delivery dates to our clients.

The objective of the 'Clock In' and 'Clock Out' buttons at the beginning and end of each and every Procedure is to make sure doing so is not overlooked, not forgotten, which skews the data every time that happens.


For Rooms to show on the Delivery Schedule, you must enter an Actual Delivery Date. If I'm working with a Client, I typically enter this in the Ballpark Estimate and Delivery Date area of the Projects page. If I am working alone, I will do this on the Ballpark Estimate Procedure page.

My personal experience is that managing the Jobsite Status (calling, emailing, texting, driving by, etc.) on a weekly basis makes managing the Delivery Schedule 100 times easier. Be proactive, checking on the jobsite status of each project weekly, and making the necessary changes to your Delivery schedule as needed.

DO NOT let your client drive this ship, it's yours and yours alone to steer. The Delivery Schedule dictates when delivery and installation CAN happen, and early on you need to insist on a TARGET (Proposed) DELIVERY DATE. This date does not change, it is a benchmark date (the Actual Delivery Date is the one that changes). This Proposed Delivery Date MUST be based on your minimum lead time and then finding a free time on the Delivery Schedule calendar AFTER that point in time.

Next, you must be perfectly clear on what happens if the client's project is not ready on the Proposed Delivery Date. Their project has to move based on available delivery and installation dates on YOUR Delivery Schedule, not based on the time difference between when they were supposed to be ready, and when they were actually ready.

Also, your 40% progress payment due prior to delivery should still be due, even if they are not ready on the agreed-upon Proposed Delivery Date. You did your part, so you are due that progress payment.

If you want to save yourself a lot of time and effort, have your client write two checks at the time of signing your Proposal, one for the 50% deposit, and another (the 40% progress payment) postdated to the Proposed Delivery Date. This saves you from having to chase it down prior to delivery.

GoodProfitGroup Member Michael Glaser started doing this thinking it was what everyone did, and when I asked why he had a bunch of undeposited checks on his desk, he said they were postdated progress payments, and I could not help but say "That is BRILLIANT!".


A Punch List is a list of things needed to finish a Project that you are in the process of Installing.

A Call Back is when a client calls and says something is wrong or damaged (not always your fault).

The Punch List used well will minimize the number of trips required to the jobsite to complete the Installation. Used as intended, the Installers enter items as they realize they are needed, and the appropriate Team Members can see this list as it is being created, and thus be getting the items ready for the return trip to complete the project.

Each of these two are also one of the columns of our Production Schedule, which is based on the Room Status, and each column has a field to the right of the Column name (e.g., Punch List, Call Back, etc.) that has a dollar amount in it. This dollar amount is a rollup of the dollar value of ALL the Rooms in the column, so tells you how much money you could collect if you got these things FINISHED.

"Two half finished projects equals exactly ZERO finished projects." -Unknown

The objective here is to have ZERO Punch Lists or Call Backs, but when you do, to keep them as a HIGH PRIORITY (to not let them fall through the cracks).


  • The flagship feature is Procedures have been completely reimagined, and work more like Tasks. A Systems Engineer can create them and assign them, or Team Members can create them for themselves as the Project makes its way through your sequence of events.
    • Procedures are now contextual (what you need to see when you need to see it).
  • Process and Timesheet databases have been added, allowing you to Clock In and Clock Out of Procedures, which will track Process time.
    • The Clock In and Clock Out buttons have been contextually added to the top and bottom of each Procedures page.
    • Process Time is ultimately your TAKT time, so utilizing this new feature will help you Identify your Constraint.
  • Navigation panes have been added throughout so that you can keep Notion's left navigation panel closed all the time (providing more left-to-right real estate for your databases).
  • A process for integrating QR Codes (created using QRCode Monkey) into your Inventory items that are self-managed by KANBAN has been added.
  • Quite a few Automation's have been added (utilizing Notion's various Automation options).
    • Several Email automations have been added so you can structure emails on Ballpark Estimates, Estimates, Drawings, and Proposals.
  • Contextual instructional pop-ups with both text and video tutorials have been added throughout that speak to what you are actually doing at the time.
  • Each Team Member's Dashboard will now allow them to do almost everything they need to do from one interface.
  • Employee Evaluations are now integrated with the Employee profile page, and if you want, can calculate a pay rate based on their evaluation score, which also provides a clear path for them on what needs to be improved upon.