An offcut is the material left over after cutting the required pieces from a bar. Whether it counts as waste depends entirely on whether it's long enough to actually be useful on a future job — below that threshold it's scrap; at or above it, it's a reusable piece of stock that's already paid for. A cutting plan that doesn't draw this line, or draws it in the wrong place, either overstates its own waste or quietly loses track of material that's genuinely worth keeping.
The line isn't fixed — it's set by you
There's no universal length above which an offcut becomes "reusable" — it depends entirely on what your shop actually does with leftover material. A 150mm offcut might be genuinely useful for one shop's typical part sizes and pure scrap for another's. This is why it's a setting, not a constant: Barcut Pro's minimum useful offcut input lets you set the exact threshold for your own work, and the optimizer classifies every bar's leftover against that number specifically, not a generic assumption.
Why this affects more than just labeling
Getting the threshold right changes the plan the optimizer should actually produce, not just how a result is described afterward:
- Set the threshold too low, and offcuts that are realistically too short to ever be used again get counted as "reusable" — inflating your apparent material efficiency without any material actually being saved.
- Set it too high, and genuinely useful remainders get written off as scrap, undercounting material you could realistically pull back into a later job.
Because the classification feeds back into what the optimizer treats as acceptable leftover on a bar, the number you set has a real effect on the plan itself, not just how the report reads afterward.
How Barcut Pro reports it
Every bar in a Barcut Pro cutting plan shows its own leftover, colored and labeled by which side of your minimum-useful-offcut threshold it falls on — reusable offcut, or scrap. Nothing is folded into a single "waste" number that hides the difference: the summary reports total reusable offcut and total scrap/waste separately, so you can see how much of your apparent "waste" is actually material still worth keeping on a shelf, labeled, for the next job.
Making offcuts actually get reused
Classifying a piece as reusable only pays off if it's genuinely used later. In practice that means treating it as real stock: label it with its length and material the moment it comes off the saw, store it somewhere it'll actually be seen before a fresh bar is opened, and — if your workflow supports it — enter it back in as an available stock length on the next relevant job rather than defaulting to new material out of habit. The optimizer can only credit an offcut as reusable if the shop floor treats it that way too.
Set your own minimum useful offcut and see the reusable-vs-scrap split on a real plan: try the 1D cutting optimizer.