The people behind these tools
We write software for glass companies. The calculators are a by-product.
HU Ingenieros has been building business software in Madrid since 1976, and among the things it builds is the system that over a hundred glass companies run their day on — the quotation, the cutting, the production paperwork and the invoice. These calculators exist because we kept writing the same maths inside that system and thought it should be free.
If you came here for a number and stayed because the working was shown, this page is what happens when the same people build you something bigger.
What we actually build
Not a product with a per-seat price and a sales team. Software written for one company, around how that company already works. In the glass trade that has meant, repeatedly:
- Quoting that knows what glass costs. Build-ups, laminates, coatings, gas fills, edgework, toughening, and the arithmetic that turns a specification into a price without a spreadsheet somebody maintains in their head.
- Cutting and optimisation inside the workflow, not as a separate program somebody re-types the list into — including the offcut rack, which is where the money actually is and which no free tool will ever do for you.
- Production paperwork the shop floor will read: cutting plans, labels, routing between processes, and knowing which order is waiting on which machine.
- Invoicing and accounting that satisfies the tax authority — in Spain that currently means Verifactu, and the reason we mention it is that compliance work is unglamorous, endless, and the single most common reason a company outgrows its old system.
- Getting data out of the thing you are running now. Usually the hardest part and the one nobody quotes for honestly.
Being straight about the ERP
The system those hundred-odd companies run day to day was built in Spain, around Spanish invoicing and tax rules, and its screens are in Spanish. We are telling you that up front because the alternative — implying there is a finished English product waiting for you — would waste your time and ours.
What we do instead is adapt it. The engine underneath is not Spanish: the quoting, the cutting, the production flow and the stock are the same problems in any country. What changes is the language, the tax rules, the document formats and the local habits, and adapting those is ordinary work we have done before rather than a research project. The same is true of the accounting side, which we also build and which is the part most systems handle worst.
So there are three honest ways this goes: the Spanish ERP as it stands if you operate in Spain, an adapted version for how you actually work, or something built for you from the parts that already exist. Which of the three it is depends on your shop, and it is a conversation rather than a price list.
Which language, and who you get
Technical work happens in English. The engineers who would build your system, and who wrote every calculator on this site, work in English without difficulty — that side of it will never be the problem.
The commercial side operates in Spanish, so if you are writing from outside Spain the sensible route is email: describe the problem in English, and you get a written reply in English from someone technical. No call you have to schedule across a time zone before anyone has even understood what you need.
Who this is worth a conversation with
Honestly, not everyone. It is worth writing if you recognise one of these:
- The quoting lives in a spreadsheet that one person understands, and that person is going to retire or leave.
- You are running three systems that do not talk, and somebody re-types between them daily.
- Your optimiser is separate from your order book, so nobody knows what is on the rack.
- You have been quoted for an off-the-shelf system that does eighty per cent of what you need and forbids the other twenty.
- Something you rely on runs on a machine nobody is allowed to switch off.
If none of that sounds like you, keep using the calculators and do not write. They stay free either way, and this page is not a toll gate.
How it goes
You write, describing the problem rather than the solution. We reply — a person who has built this kind of thing, not a form. If it is not something we should build, we say so, because a project we are wrong for costs us more than it costs you. If it is, you get a scope and a fixed figure before anything is written.
We are in Madrid, we work in Spanish and English, and we have delivered remotely for years. The time zone is friendly to the UK and workable with the US east coast.
Contact
Put "SyntaxFlow" in the subject line and say which calculator you were using. It tells us more about the problem than a paragraph of introduction would.