I thought a cheap takeoff tool would be fine for our small jobs

Last year, I bought a $99 software for doing material takeoffs on a few house additions. It kept crashing when I uploaded the PDF plans, and the measurements were off by about 5% on a lumber order. I wasted a full day redoing the work by hand and lost nearly $400 on that first lumber delivery. Has anyone found a reliable, simple takeoff program for smaller contractors?

2 comments

2 Comments

hugo5020d ago

My buddy runs a small framing crew and he swears by a program called Buildertrend for his takeoffs. He said the free version handles basic PDFs just fine for quoting additions. The key thing he mentioned was always double checking the auto measurements against one manual calculation per page, catches any weird scaling issues.

quinn_nguyen20d ago

Check the file size of your PDFs before you upload them. I had a similar crash problem and it turned out the architect sent me huge print ready files. I started asking for smaller "for review" PDFs and the cheap software worked fine. Good call by @hugo50 on the manual check, I do that on the first and last page of every set now because scaling can be weird on cover sheets and details. Saved me from a concrete order mistake last month.