Ask a cabinet maker where their last five jobs came from and you usually get the same answer. One came through a referral, maybe one off the website, and the other three came from builders they already work with.
That answer matters more than any feature list, because it tells you which problem your software actually has to solve.
What JobMan is good at
Worth saying up front: JobMan is a good product and it is not a soft target.
It is Australian owned and developed, it has been running since 2009, and it is built specifically for manufacturers. Cabinet making is its primary market, alongside shopfitting, metal fabrication and marine. The workflow it describes is Quote, Plan, Build, Deliver, Track Profit, which is a manufacturing workflow, and the feature set backs it up: inventory control, purchase ordering, capacity planning, time and attendance, a kiosk, an open API, and integrations into CAD/CAM alongside Xero, MYOB and QuickBooks.
If you are running a genuine production shop, where the constraint is sheet stock, machine time and what is physically on the racks this week, that is a serious toolset and most of it has no equivalent in Build Paperless. We do not do nesting. We do not track sheet inventory. If those are the numbers that keep you up at night, stop reading and go talk to JobMan.
The problem most cabinet makers actually have
The trouble is that a lot of shops calling themselves cabinet makers are not really running a factory. They are running a job shop with a workshop attached.
The work arrives as a builder's drawing set with a joinery schedule buried in it. You price the kitchen, the robes, the vanities and the laundry. You wait. Three weeks later the builder confirms, but the client has changed the island and nobody told you in writing. You cut anyway because the site is waiting, and you argue about the variation at the end.
Nothing in that sequence is a manufacturing problem. It is a communication problem with money attached, and it happens in the gap between you and the builder.
Where the two products actually differ
This is the real split, and it is not about feature count.
JobMan optimises what happens inside your four walls. Build Paperless optimises what happens between you and the builder who is paying you.
In Build Paperless a trade business gets its own account for quoting, crew scheduling, timesheets and invoicing, the same as any job management tool. The difference is that builders running Paperless can assign you jobs and send you RFQs directly into that same account. You are not re-keying a scope out of an email into your own system. The job, the drawings, the variations and the approvals sit in one place, and the audit trail is shared with the person who has to sign it off.
That is the feature cabinet makers keep telling us decided it, and it is the one thing a pure manufacturing system structurally cannot give you, because it has no concept of the builder on the other side.
Takeoff that knows what a kitchen is
The second one is estimating, and this is where the products genuinely diverge.
Pricing a joinery package means reading a plan, a handful of elevations and a finishes schedule, then turning that into linear metres, carcass counts and hardware. Most shops do it in a spreadsheet built up over years, and it works right up until the person who built the spreadsheet is on holiday.
Build Paperless has a cabinet maker estimator that reads your cabinet drawings directly, or takes the job through a chat intake if you would rather describe it than upload it, and prices it through a deterministic Australian rate engine. It is switched on per account rather than being on by default, so ask for it.
Three things about it are worth knowing, because they are the parts that took the longest to get right.
It measures to the standards, not to a generic idea of a box. Kitchen assemblies follow AS/NZS 4386.1 and installation follows 4386.2, with panel products to AS/NZS 1859.1 for particleboard and 1859.2 for MDF.
It locks the scope. You tell it whether the job is a kitchen and pantry, built-in joinery, wardrobes and storage, or a vanity and laundry, and those are mutually exclusive. A wardrobe job will never price a sink cutout. A vanity job will never price a cooktop cutout. That constraint is enforced in the pricing engine itself rather than being a suggestion in a prompt, which matters because the failure mode of a general purpose AI estimator is confidently pricing something that is not in the job.
And it refuses to price engineered stone at all. More on that below.
That is a narrower tool than a general takeoff, deliberately. It only does cabinetmaking, and it does it to the standard the work is actually built to.
What it costs
Price is usually where this conversation lands.
JobMan publishes its tiers, which is more than most of this category does. Small starts from $250 per month, Medium from $650, Large from $1,250.
Build Paperless starts at $99 per month ex GST for a one-person office, or $79 per admin seat once you have a team. Seats that a builder invites you into are free, so getting pulled onto a builder's job costs you nothing.
For a two-person shop that difference is real money, but do not choose on price alone. A cheaper tool that does not fit how you work is not cheaper. Choose on whether your constraint is the workshop or the builder.
The honest verdict
Pick JobMan if your business is manufacturing first. High volume, real inventory, machine scheduling, CAD/CAM in the loop, a costed bill of materials that has to reconcile. That is what it was built for and it does it properly.
Pick Build Paperless if your business is builder work first. If the difference between a good month and a bad one is how fast approvals come back and whether variations got signed before you cut, then the builder connection, the shared audit trail and takeoff from plans are worth more to you than capacity planning.
Plenty of shops sit between the two. If that is you, the question to ask is which of your last five jobs went wrong, and where. If it went wrong on the floor, that is one product. If it went wrong in an email thread with a builder, that is the other.
The engineered stone problem nobody talks about
Engineered stone has been prohibited nationally since 1 July 2024. That ban covers manufacture, supply, processing and installation, not just fabrication.
Two years on, plenty of shops still have engineered stone sitting in a saved quote template or a rate library, because nobody went back through the templates after the ban. It is dormant until the day someone builds a quote off an old template and it prints on a document with your name on it.
Our estimator refuses to price it. Not a warning, not a flag you can click through. The rate engine will not return a price for engineered stone, because a quoting tool that will happily price prohibited work on request is a liability dressed up as flexibility.
That is a small thing that tells you something about how the module was built, and it is the kind of detail that only comes from Australian rules being designed in rather than bolted on. Whichever system you end up running, go and audit your saved templates. Most people find something.
Want to see it against your own drawings? Upload a real joinery package and see what the takeoff gives you before you commit to anything. Start a free 14-day trial, no credit card required, or see how we compare to the other platforms.