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Our $15k estimating software quoted a 900 sq ft garage as 90 sq ft and I caught it by accident
I was in the office on a Tuesday night last month, double checking a bid before we sent it out, and noticed the square footage looked off by a factor of ten. Turns out the markup tool was reading the scale wrong because someone had imported the PDF at half size, which also threw off the takeoff by about $38,000. I spent two hours redrawing the boundaries by hand and re-ran it, then called the rep the next morning to ask why there was no check for that. He said "yeah, that happens sometimes" and sent me a help article. Has anyone found a takeoff tool that actually flags a scale mismatch before it wrecks your bid?
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sanchez.mia10d ago
yeah, that happens sometimes" is the most useless sentence in the English language, right up there with "did you try turning it off and on." My own dumb version of this was importing a plan at 1/8 scale when it was 1/4 and wondering why every wall in my takeoff was a mile long. Took me way too long to figure out it was me, not the software. The wild part in your case is you only caught it because you were there late on a Tuesday, which means the other 99 bids that go out fine are just luck. I don't know of a tool that throws up a red flag on scale, but if someone builds one they'd make a killing off the rest of us.
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