Takeoffs that check themselves

We do exterior work: masonry, EIFS and stucco, coatings and concrete. Almost every job we price arrives as a PDF drawing set from a general contractor or a public owner, plus a spec book and an addendum or two.

For years the takeoff was the bottleneck. You open an elevation, trace every wall, subtract the windows, write the number down, then do it again on the next sheet. Then you read the specs, hunting for the paragraph that says the sealant must be one brand, or the sample panel is on you. Then you build the spreadsheet. Then, last, the proposal. When two bids were due the same week, one of them didn’t get our best work.

So we built a system that does the first pass for us.

How it runs day to day

The drawings, specs and addenda go into the bid folder. The takeoff tool opens the elevation sheets, checks the scale against a dimension we know, and measures each material: EIFS here, brick there, sealant joints around every opening.

At the same time, ChatGPT and Gemini get the same sheets and do their own count and their own read of the specs. Claude puts the three answers side by side. Where they agree, we move on. Where they don’t, that wall gets measured again until we know why. Anything that only shows up in a note, or has no dimensions at all, goes into the estimate in red as an allowance with a VERIFY flag.

Then it builds the workbook from our own past unit prices, writes the proposal in our usual format, and makes a marked-up set of every sheet to attach. The GC’s estimator can see at a glance what we priced and what we left out.

What still needs a person

Dom does. He checks every sheet before a number leaves the office. He calls the manufacturer’s rep when a spec needs an approved installer. And he sets the final price, because he knows which GC pays on time and which job will have a crew waiting on other trades. The system gives him the quantities, the range and the risks. It doesn’t decide whether we want the job.

If you price work from drawings

You don’t need our exact setup. Roofers, painters, electricians and sitework crews all do some version of this: measure, price, write it up. We build the version that fits your trade, on your own accounts, starting from your own past prices. See estimating and takeoff automation for how a build like this goes.