Intro: looking at bottlenecks in estimating & takeoffs
Hey everyone, I’m James, based in Sydney. Over the last little while I’ve been deep in the weeds on how residential contractors actually do their estimating/quoting and takeoffs day to day. The more people I talk to, the more it seems like this part of the business is a massive bottleneck. Some of the patterns I keep hearing: - Nights and weekends lost measuring off PDFs just to get a quote out the door - Drawings changing and having to redo big chunks of work from scratch - Numbers getting moved from plans to spreadsheets to BOQs, and just hoping there isn’t a fat‑finger mistake in there somewhere I’m currently working on an automation to streamline a lot of this and cut down the grunt work. Not here to pitch or drop links mainly keen to sanity-check what I’m doing against what you’re actually dealing with on the ground. So I’m curious: what’s the most broken or frustrating part of your current takeoff / quoting workflow? Keen to learn from you guys and happy to share what I’m seeing as well. Cheers, James