Paper requirement calculator
Turn a carton order into a purchase list. Enter the box and the quantity, and get the kilograms of every liner and fluting grade it needs — consolidated into order lines, with your own waste allowance applied.
Box size
Inside dimensions of the finished carton.
Board
2 liners + 1 medium = 3 sheets
Paper
Use your last buying rate.
Order
Trim, setup and run waste
More options
Paper to buy
1,971 kg
5,000 boxes · 18 × 12 × 12 in · 3-Ply · C-Flute
Per box
375 g
board weight
Paper cost
Rs 314,102
incl. 5% allowance
Reel planning
About 6.6 reels of board weight at 300 kg each — the app works it out per grade at the real deckle.
A requirement in kilos is not a purchase order. Quick Safa converts it to the deckle you actually stock, tells you which reels to issue for each grade, and books the consumption against inventory when the job runs.
Sign up to unlockPurchase lines
Sheets sharing a grade, GSM and rate are combined into one order line.
ATL120 gsm
Liner · sheets 1, 3 · Rs 165.00/kg
1,234.8kg
Rs 203,742
62.7% of board weight
CMP100 gsm
Fluting medium · sheet 2 · Rs 150.00/kg
735.7kg
Rs 110,360
37.3% of board weight
The exact requirement is theoretical board weight from your GSM and rates. Real consumption also depends on how well the blank fits the reel width you buy — the biggest source of avoidable paper waste in a corrugating plant.
From order quantity to purchase order
Buying paper for a job is a three-step problem, and most plants only do the first step on paper. The theoretical requirement is straightforward arithmetic. What decides whether you actually have enough is the two steps after it — the allowance you carry for waste, and whether the reel width you own suits the blank you are about to run.
Theoretical weight
Board weight per box multiplied by the order quantity, split by grade and GSM.
Waste allowance
Trim, setup sheets and run waste — a plant-specific figure that belongs on top, never buried inside.
Reel matching
The step that decides real consumption: how well the blank fits the deckle you actually stock.
This page does the first two and keeps them visibly separate, because a waste percentage folded silently into a requirement is how a plant loses track of its own efficiency. If you cannot see the theoretical figure next to the issued figure, you cannot tell whether waste is 4% or 14% — and that gap, on a plant buying a few hundred tonnes a year, is a serious amount of money.
The third step needs your stock
Reel matching cannot be done on a public page — it needs to know which deckles you hold, what your corrugator's maximum web width is, and which blanks have to be split across two pieces. Quick Safa holds all three and computes consumption from what the plant really cuts, then books it against inventory when the job runs.
Frequently asked questions
How much paper does a corrugated box order need?
Work out the board weight of one box, then multiply by the order quantity. The board weight of a single box is the area of its blank multiplied by the GSM of each sheet in the ply stack, with extra allowed on the fluting mediums for the corrugation wave. Add a waste allowance on top for trim, setup sheets and run waste, and the result is what you need to have in stock before the job starts.
What waste allowance should I use?
It varies by plant and by job. Well-run corrugating operations on long, standard runs often work to around 3–5%. Short runs, frequent size changes, heavy printing or poor reel-width matching can push it well into double digits. Rather than trusting a rule of thumb, compare what you actually issued against what the job theoretically needed over a few months — that gap is your real allowance, and it is usually larger than people expect.
Why are my liners and mediums combined into one line?
Because you buy them that way. A 5-ply board using the same 120 GSM test liner on the outer, middle and inner facings is one purchase of that grade, not three. This calculator consolidates any sheets that share a grade, GSM and rate into a single purchase line so the output can be handed to the buying office as-is.
How many reels do I need?
That depends on the reel weight you buy and, critically, on the deckle. Kilograms alone do not tell you how many reels to issue, because a reel wider than your blank leaves trim on every metre that runs. Quick Safa works this out per grade against the reel widths your plant actually stocks and books the consumption against inventory when the job runs.
Why does reel width matter so much?
It is the largest source of avoidable paper waste in a corrugating plant and the easiest to overlook. If your blank needs a 24-inch deckle and the narrowest reel you stock is 26 inches, you throw away roughly 8% of every kilogram that passes through the corrugator — on every run, on every job, permanently. Buying one more reel width can pay for itself faster than almost any machine upgrade.
Does this replace stock management?
No. It tells you what an order needs; it does not know what you already hold, what is committed to other jobs, or what is in transit from the mill. That is what the Quick Safa inventory module does — real-time stock by grade with movement history, consumption booked automatically when a job runs, and reorder visibility against open orders.
Stop calculating this twice
In Quick Safa the requirement comes off the job automatically, checks against live stock by grade, raises the purchase order to your supplier, and books consumption when the job runs — so the number in the buying office and the number on the floor are the same number.