Turning the parts in your drawing into a sheet layout — with your own board size, blade and trim.
A cutting list tells you what parts you need. It does not tell you how many boards to buy, or how to get those parts out of them. That step — the layout — is usually done in separate software, which means exporting, re-importing, and keeping two things in sync.
Cutting optimization is its own category of software, and it expects a list as input: part sizes, quantities, material. So the workflow becomes draw → list → export → optimize → print, with a handover at every arrow. Each handover is a place where the data can drift out of date.
For a workshop that already has the parts drawn in AutoCAD, that is a lot of moving between programs to answer a fairly simple question: how many sheets, and how do I cut them.
The PANELCUT module reads the parts on a chosen layer of the drawing and nests them onto boards. This is sheet nesting done inside AutoCAD, from the model itself. There is no export step, because the source is the drawing you already have.
What matters is that it uses your numbers, not generic ones:
A layout calculated with the wrong kerf looks fine on paper and comes up short at the saw — which is why these are settings, not assumptions.
Every board is reported with its offcut waste and its material utilisation. That number is useful twice: it tells you how many sheets to order, and it tells you what the job actually costs in material — before you have committed to anything.
The summary sheet goes to the office — sheet count, waste, utilisation. The cutting maps go to the shop floor, each board drawn with its parts positioned on it, so the operator has a picture rather than a list of numbers.
This module is not part of the plans — it attaches to whichever subscription you already have, for €30 per machine per month, with no plan upgrade needed. It is also not included in the 14-day trial; the videos above show it running on a real drawing. See the module page →
The module page has the full walkthrough, with videos of every step.
Panel Cutting module