Purchasing Guides / Construction Takeoff & Draft Estimates

Construction Takeoff & Draft Estimates

A purchasing guide to a workflow that counts and measures selected items on your drawings, then prepares quantities and a draft estimate for your estimator.

Yearly running cost

Assuming 360 bids a year

By hand
$82.1K / year
2,160 hours of work
Subscription
Quote needed
This workflow
$296 / year
Machine usage only; setup, hosting and review are extra.
What should the takeoff cover?

Count and measure the agreed trade items, with marks showing where each quantity came from. Add your cost codes and rates for a draft estimate.

One bid includes up to 60 drawing sheets and 40 specification pages.

Your estimator approves quantities, prices and margin. It never submits a bid or sets the final price.

What is included

Read the drawings and specifications for your trade, count and measure each item, map quantities to your cost items and unit prices, and produce a takeoff sheet, marked-up sheets and a draft estimate with assumptions and exclusions.

Start with a few past bids where you have the finished takeoff and estimate, your cost item list with unit prices and labour units, and the trade scope you bid. The connected option picks up bid sets from your plan room or shared folder, writes the draft into your estimating software and shows quantity changes when an addendum arrives.

Drawing pages: up to 30 pages.

Input budget: up to 150,000 tokens.

Output budget: up to 20,000 tokens.

Attempts per stage: up to 2 attempts.

How close should the quantities and pricing be?

Choose how closely counts, measurements and cost item mapping must match a careful hand takeoff, and how much of the scope it must find.

How these standards are measured

Test on held-out past bids that your estimators took off by hand, including revised sheets, unclear legends and poor scans. Compare counts and measurements line by line with the hand takeoff and check each line is mapped to the right cost item. A line without a sheet and detail reference counts as a failure. Use independent reviewer labels, not the workflow's own output. Holding every item cannot pass the accuracy targets. Check citations against the current source version. Any unauthorised write or release fails the pilot.

Targets for your selected standard
What is checkedTarget
Counts correctCounted lines whose quantity equals the hand takeoff, divided by all counted lines in the test bids.≥95%
Measurements within toleranceMeasured lengths, areas and volumes within the tolerance agreed per cost item, divided by all measured lines. Sheets with a wrong or missing scale count as failures unless flagged.≥95%
Lines on the right cost itemTakeoff lines mapped to the cost item and unit an estimator would use, divided by all priced lines.≥95%
Scope items foundItems in the hand takeoff that appear in the draft, divided by all items in the hand takeoff. Items raised as questions count as found.≥97%
Lines with sheet and detail referenceEvery takeoff line must name the sheet and the detail, schedule or location it came from.≥100%
Approval controls passNo unapproved send, stamp, bid, status change or overwrite. A source change cancels a pending approval. Test malicious document instructions and repeated requests.≥100%

The takeoff and estimate are drafts for an estimator to check. Your estimator still reviews the marked-up sheets, settles assumptions and exclusions, and sets the price and margin.

How quickly should the draft be ready?

Choose how long after the bid set is uploaded the takeoff and draft estimate are ready. Estimator review time is separate.

Timing details

Time from upload to finished takeoff sheet and draft estimate, including reading every sheet, counting, measuring, pricing, queueing and retries. Very large bid sets may need agreed limits. Confirm sheet counts and hardware with your provider.

The target applies to at least 95% of agreed test runs, with 2 in progress at a time.

How much do you want to spend per bid?

Choose the machine budget for reading drawings and specifications and drafting the estimate. Tighter budgets may read fewer sheets at full detail.

Cost details

Includes drawing recognition compute, model calls, retries and a shared hosting allocation. Plan room and estimating software subscriptions, your estimators' time and the calling agent are separate. Each addendum re-run is another run.

Reference machine cost: $1.82 – 3.82 per bid at 30 bids a month. The selected cap is a target to test, not a replacement for this estimate.

Where do you want it to run?

Run it in your cloud or on your own server. Choose whether drawing and specification pages may go to an approved AI service.

Data and access details

Runs in a cloud account you control, with access controls and logs.

Only the sheets, legends and specification pages being read go to the selected external model; counting runs on your own compute. Agree access and retention first.

Give the workflow read access to bid documents and your price list and write access only to draft estimates. Owner drawings may carry confidentiality terms; check them before choosing an external model. Private models only keeps drawings on your hardware; the connected option still reaches your own plan room and estimating software.

How do you want to use it?

Use the upload page, your current AI agent or markups in your PDF review tool. You can choose more than one.

Anything else your provider should know?

Optional. Your choices are included automatically.

Common questions

Do I need this if we already use a takeoff tool?

Not necessarily. If a takeoff subscription already measures your drawings well and your estimators are happy to price in it, keep it. Buy a workflow when you need your own cost items and labour units applied, a draft in your estimating software, or drawings kept in your environment.

Will it submit bids or set our price?

No. It prepares quantities and a draft estimate. Your estimator approves quantities and prices, sets the margin and submits the bid.

What happens when the drawings are unclear?

Unclear symbols, missing scales and conflicts between drawings and specifications are listed as questions or assumptions with the sheet reference, not guessed. Your estimator decides or sends a question to the design team.

Which trades can it handle?

One trade scope per setup, such as electrical devices, concrete, doors and hardware, or drywall. Each extra trade needs its own cost items and test bids; agree that with your provider.

Can I run it without sending drawings to an external AI service?

Yes. Choose private models and supply your own hardware. Measure reading quality and running cost during the pilot.

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