🪨 Stone, Quartz & Granite Studios
Every slab has wastage. Every edge has a price. Every cutout takes time. Slabr knows this — and builds it into every quote automatically, so your stone studio stops leaving money on the bench.
Built for stone studios · Guided onboarding
Product preview
Slab-yield pricing, edge add-ons, margin guardrails. Preview using sample data based on the Slabr workflow model.
Live margin, conversion and stage health across active quotes
Six pain points · Six fixes
These problems are not solved by quoting harder — they are solved by pricing the slab the way it actually arrives.
You quote $46/m² and think you know your margin. But the slab you bought is 3.2m × 1.6m and the cutout wastes 0.4m². The offcut goes in the yard — unsaleable. Your real cost per usable m² is $60. Slabr's wastage engine computes net slab yield from gross slab dimensions, applies your wastage %, and reprices every quote automatically. The number you quote is the number that makes money.
A pencil edge profile is $10/m. A waterfall edge on a kitchen island is $65/m — and takes 4× longer. Most studios bolt edge pricing onto the quote as a rough guess, then wonder why that job lost margin. Slabr has an edge profile catalogue with its own per-metre pricing. Add it to any quote line, it calculates the lineal metres automatically, and the correct edge cost lands in the quote before the client sees it.
Edge profile add-on catalogue with configurable lin.m pricing on the cut list, attached to any countertop line item.
Your measurer goes on site, takes dimensions on paper, and somehow those numbers reach the fabrication floor. Sometimes. Slabr stages your entire workflow — measure, template, fabricate, polish, inspect, deliver, install. Each stage has a QR scan, a responsible person, and a timestamp, with variance against the original measurements logged on every change. Your team knows exactly what to do next. You know exactly where every job is at any moment.
QR-scanned production stages: Measure → Template → Cut → Fabricate → Polish → QC → Install. Stage status updates as the team logs scans.
Your client signs off on a quote by replying 'yes looks good' on WhatsApp. Months later, when they don't like something, they claim they never approved it. Slabr's client portal gives every client a branded, mobile-friendly page with their quote, drawings, edge selections, and material specifications. They click Approve. The system timestamps it. That's your signed order — legally defensible.
Client portal with digital quote approval, material selection confirmation, and audit-timestamped sign-off.
Every sink cutout, hob cutout, and tap hole takes machine time and a blade. A double-bowl undermount sink cutout should cost $35–$50. Most studios charge $11 or nothing at all because they forget to add it. Slabr has a cutout and feature catalogue — sink, hob, tap, drain board, apron, mitred corner — each with its own price that auto-adds to the quote when you tick the box.
Cutout and feature catalogue with per-item pricing, auto-appended to countertop quote lines.
You quote supply and install. The supply margin is fine. The install costs you $150 in labour and van. You charged $65. Slabr separates supply and install as distinct quote sections with their own cost-plus-margin, so your install rate covers actual crew time, transport, and consumables — every time, not just when you remember to add it.
Separate install line section with configurable labour rate, travel zone, and consumable allowance.
Tax-aware invoicing, designed around the realities of your trade.
Locale-aware tax codes (VAT, GST, sales tax) with full SA SARS support for South African studios.
If you can build a quote in Excel, you can build a better one in Slabr in half the time.
Export everything at any time — quotes, invoices, job history, materials. No lock-in.
We know the difference between a bullnose and an ogee — and what it means when the slab is 5mm short.
How it runs
Measure on a phone, quote in five minutes, install with a scan. Every stage timestamped, every spec auditable.
Create the job in Slabr on your phone. Record site dimensions, take photos, note edge selections and material choices.
Pull dimensions into the quote. Slabr prices m² automatically with wastage, adds edges, cutouts, and install. Review margin before sending.
Client receives a link — no login required. They see the full quote, material spec, and edge details. One click to approve.
Approved quote triggers a job card on the production floor. Slab is reserved in inventory. Stage timeline is set.
Your team scans QR at each stage: template cut, fabrication, polishing, QC sign-off. Status updates as scans land.
Install team scans on-site QR to mark complete. Photo upload. Invoice generated from job — sent directly to client.
Built for stone
No other system prices slabs with real wastage, links cutouts to quotes, and tracks templates to install with QR scans. Slabr was built for how stone studios actually work.
Cost of the silent error
Each one is a quiet leak — visible in margin reports months later, never in any single quote. The fixes are operational, not motivational.
A 3.2 m × 1.6 m slab is 5.12 m² on paper. By the time you account for the bookmatch line, two seam allowances, a sink-cutout drop and an unsaleable offcut, the usable area on a typical kitchen run is closer to 3.6–4.1 m². Studios that quote against the 5.12 m² nominal silently absorb the missing m² as ghost-cost on every job. The fix is to price from a yielded m² figure derived from your actual material+layout history, not the slab dimensions a supplier writes on the packing list.
Granite, dolomite, Calacatta-veined marble and engineered quartz do not yield the same. Heavily-veined marbles routinely lose 25–35% to vein-match rejects and crack-prone edges; consistent engineered quartz commonly yields 90%+ on the same layout. A single shop-wide wastage % flattens this real cost variance and quietly subsidises the worst-yielding stones with margin from the best. Each material grade should carry its own yield band, so the margin guardrail compares like-for-like instead of averaging the truth away.
A bookmatch doubles your slab requirement and roughly halves your usable m². Two slabs sliced to mirror a vein at the seam means the second slab is committed to that single feature — its remainder rarely fits another job. Studios that quote bookmatched feature walls at the same yield as a kitchen countertop are off by 40–50% on material alone. Bookmatched and vein-matched layouts need their own yield band, with a higher wastage baseline and a separate offcut policy that recognises the remainder is usually unrecoverable.
A pencil edge and a mitred waterfall are not the same product — they differ by 4–6× on machine time and operator skill. Studios that add edge cost as a single round-number "edge upgrade" line item lose money on every complex profile and over-charge for every simple one. Each profile should live in a catalogue with its own per-linear-metre rate, and the quote should derive total edge cost from the actual perimeter on the cut list — so the price the client sees is the price the floor will actually produce against.
A 5 mm drift on a templated counter is a recut. A wall that was assumed plumb but is 12 mm out across 3 m is a re-fabrication. Most stone studios absorb survey-derived rework as "the cost of doing kitchens" and never track it as variance against the original quote. The result is a consistently optimistic margin report and no signal telling you which templater, which install crew, or which site type is producing the rework. Variance has to be logged against the job, attributed, and rolled up — otherwise the studio repeats the same loss every quarter.
Frequently asked
The questions stone-studio owners actually ask us, with answers that cross-link into the deep glossary so you can dig further.
Yield bands vary by material because vein-matching and crack-propensity differ. Mid-grade granites and consistent engineered quartz often achieve 85–92% yield on standard kitchen layouts. Heavily-veined marbles like Calacatta or Statuario commonly run 65–75% because vein matching forces specific orientations and rejects more offcuts. Exotic onyx and book-matched feature stones can drop to 50–60%. The right approach is to track your own yield by material grade over the last 12 months and apply that figure as the wastage component on every quote. A studio applying a flat 15% wastage across all materials is materially under-pricing its veined-marble work.
Wastage % is the leftover fraction — the share of the slab that does not become saleable surface. Yield band is the inverse, framed as a tolerance: a yield band of 80–88% means usable area is expected to land within that range, with anything outside it flagged as a variance to investigate. Wastage is a single number applied to a quote; yield band is an operating range used to calibrate that number, separate normal performance from outliers, and tell you when a particular templater, fabricator or material is consistently underperforming. Most shops should quote against the lower end of the band and review jobs that come in below it.
Bookmatched work needs its own yield band, separate from kitchen-counter work. The matched seam consumes two slabs for the appearance of one continuous figure, and the remainder of the second slab is rarely recoverable for another job because the vein orientation is wrong for anything else. Quote bookmatched feature walls at 50–60% yield, charge for both slabs in full, and treat any usable remainder as a windfall offcut credited back to the client only if you genuinely sell it. Studios that quote bookmatch at standard kitchen yield routinely lose 40–50% of margin on every feature wall they ship.
Offcuts only have value if the next job actually consumes them and the studio knows about them when quoting. The mechanism is an offcut register: every leftover piece above a minimum size is photographed, dimensioned, tagged with the source slab and parked in inventory at a written-down value. When the next quote opens, the system suggests offcut substitutions for small pieces — splash backs, vanity tops, hearths. Without a register, the offcut yard becomes a graveyard of slowly-cracking material that books no revenue and crowds out new stock. The discipline is dull but the margin recovery is real.
Edges and cutouts are unit-of-work items, not percentages of the surface price. Each profile (pencil, eased, half-bullnose, ogee, mitred waterfall) carries its own per-linear-metre rate that reflects machine time and operator skill. Each cutout (sink, hob, tap, drain board, apron) carries its own per-item rate that reflects the time on the bridge saw or CNC. The quote derives total edge cost from the actual perimeter on the cut list and total cutout cost from a checklist applied to each countertop line. Bundling them into the m² rate hides the cost driver and makes margin analysis impossible.
Substantial Completion (SC) under AIA contracts (US) and Practical Completion (PC) under JBCC contracts (Southern Africa) are sibling concepts: they mark the point at which the works can be used for their intended purpose, even if minor items remain. Both trigger handover, start the defects-liability period, and (for retention-bearing contracts) release the first portion of retention. The differences are procedural — AIA requires architect certification, JBCC requires the principal agent — but for stone install on commercial fit-out the practical operation is the same: a snag list is issued, the contractor commits to closing it within an agreed period, and the retention timeline begins.
Cited references
Industry references underpinning the yield, wastage and process figures used on this page.
External links open in a new tab. The MDPI-cited solid-scrap loss range (10–35%) is drawn from the peer-reviewed dimension-stone study above; other figures on this page (margin uplift, quote turn-around) are illustrative, derived from the Slabr workflow model — your actuals will differ. Yield band, wastage and offcut definitions in the FAQ above are linked to the deep glossary for further reading.
Get started
Set up your stone studio in Slabr in under 30 minutes. Load your slab materials, set your wastage rates, build your edge catalogue — and send your first properly-priced quote today.
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