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?

3 comments

3 Comments

hugo503mo 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.

jade2211mo ago

That manual check thing really got me thinking because I used to be the type who just trusted the software completely and never double checked anything on the drawings. Had a job last spring where the fireplace wall was supposed to be 18 feet but the freebie program I was using measured it as 16 because the PDF got compressed weird when I saved it. Took me a whole day to figure out why the lumber I ordered was short and I had to eat the extra cost myself. Now I do what you guys are saying and spot check at least the first page and any detail sheets before I send anything to the supplier. Do you find that scaling issues show up more on specific page types like sections or is it pretty random?

quinn_nguyen3mo 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.