You get handed a 300-sheet set Monday, the bid closes Friday, and none of the pricing can start until the boring part is done: reading every page, counting every symbol, reconciling a legend that fights you sheet to sheet, then rebuilding somebody’s workbook into your own template so the numbers line up. That work is a full day gone before you make a single judgment call, and on a heavy week it’s exactly why the third bid never leaves the building.
An electrical sub we work with used to burn about an hour per sheet just on the counting pass. Sixteen sheets is two days before pricing. With the agent taking that first read, they’ve clocked 2 to 4 hours saved on a typical takeoff and 4 to 6 hours on a single job. At a fully loaded rate of about $65/hr (a real customer’s own math, $50/hr plus 30% burden), that’s roughly $130 to $390 back on every takeoff, and it’s the gap between two bids out and three.
Here is what estimators actually handed the agent this week, in their own words.
Count and label the whole set, per sheet and job total
The single most repeated ask is raw counting off the plans, the part everyone hates and nobody has time for:
“please use the asset counting skill to count and label all the assets from each legend across these sheets. give me per-sheet totals as well as job totals”
“please provide a solid lighting count - run through it twice please. Do not count and detail drawings or enlarged drawings”
You drop in the set, name the exceptions (skip the detail and enlarged drawings, run it twice to be sure), and get back a marked-up PDF with per-sheet and job totals, legend reconciled. Structural steel gets the same treatment: “complete a structural steel and misc steel takeoff on the Dine College 100 set.” One electrical estimating team went from about 2 hours per sheet on lighting counts to seconds, and pulled a usable takeoff roughly 30 minutes after first login. Across a full set, that hour a sheet was the whole reason counting used to eat your Monday, and now it’s the part you check instead of the part you grind.
Ask the specs a question, get the answer with a citation
The second-biggest pull is spec and drawing Q&A, the lookups that send you flipping through a PDF for twenty minutes:
“does the specs list a material type for bolts, washers, nuts etc..”
“CAN CONTROL CONDUIT BE PVC THROUGH THE SLAB”
“what size data conduit is required for structured cabling devices?”
You ask in plain language and the agent reads the set for you: material callouts, allowable conduit types, minimum sizing for structured cabling, with the page reference so you can point a GC or a bidder straight to it. The lookup that used to mean scrolling the spec book yourself now runs while you keep working the estimate. Every one of those twenty-minute hunts you skip is twenty minutes back on the sheet that’s actually due, and the citation means you’re not trusting a guess, you’re trusting the drawing.
Level the sub bids side by side
The third pattern is bid leveling, taking a stack of sub quotes and lining them up so you can see who’s missing what:
“now level the earthwork and concrete bids”
“Use Ryan’s Leveling Tab and the Dine 100 Plans and Specs to Level these Fire Supresssion Bids”
“give me the sub leveling side by side”
You hand over the bids plus your own leveling tab, and you get a normalized side-by-side: scope gaps flagged, exclusions surfaced, the clarification questions each bidder still owes you. A GC we work with runs scope checklists and bid-leveling summaries this way and turned a task that took about an hour by hand into minutes, roughly an hour saved on every project that hits the leveling stage. That hour isn’t the point on its own. The point is that leveling four trades on a Thursday afternoon stops being the thing that decides whether Friday’s bid is real.
Rebuild the workbook to your template
The fourth ask is Excel wrangling, the quiet tax on every bid where somebody hands you a file that doesn’t match how your shop works:
“recreate this workbook without filters and formats”
“combine the totals for both rider A’s in this excel”
You get back a clean workbook in the shape you asked for: filters stripped, formatting normalized, duplicate riders merged and totaled. It’s the least glamorous request in the pile and one of the most common, because reformatting a subcontractor’s spreadsheet by hand is thirty minutes of clicking that produces nothing you can bill. Handing that off means the half-hour of copy-paste becomes the half-hour you spend checking the number instead of building the grid, and the file comes back in your format, not theirs.
What this changes for you
The through-line across every estimator ask this week is the same one as last week, only sharper. The agent takes the mechanical first pass, the counting, the spec lookups, the leveling grid, the workbook rebuild, so your hours land on the calls that actually need you: which assumptions to carry, where the plans and specs disagree, what number you’re willing to sign your name under. You don’t end up with fewer estimators. You end up with the room to say yes to the third bid instead of turning it down at 4pm Thursday.
If you want to feel it fast, drop one real plan set in and ask for a full count with per-sheet and job totals. First usable output tends to land inside half an hour.
