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

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