Measure once, and the whole estimate follows
Take-Off measures quantities straight off your PDF drawings — counts, lengths, areas — and feeds them into the Bill of Quantities. Drag one corner when the client moves a wall, and the concrete, the mesh, the membrane and the formwork all move with it.
Available on the Estimator plan and above
The measurement is not the point. What it is wired to is the point.
Plenty of software will let you click along a wall and show you a number. The number is the easy part. What matters is that the number lands in a take-off field, and that BOQ items take their quantity from that field.
Four steps, every time
Every take-off you will ever do is the same four steps in the same order. There is no project setup ritual to learn.
- 1
Open the drawing
Take-Off reads PDFs from the costing's Documents area — native or scanned, any number of pages. It reopens on the drawing you were last working on, and shows each page's scale and how many measurements are on it.
- 2
Set the scale
Pick the ratio — 1:50, 1:100, 1:200. If the sheet has been photocopied or printed to a non-standard size, calibrate it against a known dimension instead of trusting the printed ratio.
- 3
Choose a field, and measure
A field is where the quantity lives. Give it a unit, and the right tools light up. Then count, trace or drag. A field collects measurements across as many pages of the drawing as you like.
- 4
Price against it
The field becomes a variable your BOQ formulas can use. From then on the estimate maintains itself when the drawing changes.
Five tools, and that is the lot
Everything you take off a residential drawing is a count, a length or an area — and anything genuinely rectangular takes two clicks rather than four.
| Tool | Key | How you use it | What you would measure with it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Count | C | One click per item | Doors, windows, downlights, taps, posts, tie-downs |
| Line | L | Drag end to end | A single length, or a check against a figured dimension |
| Polyline | P | Click each corner along a run | Skirting, footings, kerbs, fencing, wall runs |
| Area | A | Click each corner of the shape | Slabs, roofs, floor finishes, ceilings |
| Rectangle | R | Click one corner, then the opposite one | Rooms, slabs, panels and anything else that really is a rectangle |
Finding one measurement again, six weeks later
A house take-off ends up with hundreds of shapes across a dozen sheets. Three things make that a list you can work with rather than a pile you scroll.
Name the ones that matter
Any measurement can be given a name — Alfresco slab, Garage — so the list reads as the job rather than as a column of numbers.
Click between the list and the drawing
Click a row and its shape is outlined on the plan, turning to the right page if it is on another one. Click a shape and its field opens with that row highlighted.
Nothing moves unless you say so
Shapes cannot be dragged out of place while you pan around. Moving one is deliberate: switch Move on, move it, and it switches itself off again.
Stop typing 2.4 onto every wall in the building
Give a field a default height and a traced wall run becomes an area — length × height, automatically. Give an M3 field a default depth and a traced slab outline becomes a volume.
Which means you can trace the same slab outline twice, into two fields with different units, and get an area and a volume from one shape. Both follow every change you make afterwards.
One floor plan, three fields
| Field | Unit | Set | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| Slab area | M2 | — | 186.40 m² |
| Slab concrete | M3 | depth 0.1 | 18.64 m³ |
| External wall | M2 | height 2.4 | 130.08 m² |
A take-off you can defend six weeks later
Accuracy in a digital take-off is mostly about how precisely you can click. These are the habits that make the difference.
Hold Shift
Constrains to 0°, 45° or 90° from the last point. Walls and slab edges are overwhelmingly square, and this is the difference between a tidy take-off and one that is half a degree out everywhere.
Points snap
Corners snap to measurements you have already drawn, so shapes that share an edge meet exactly rather than nearly.
Undo one point
Ctrl+Z takes back the last corner rather than the whole shape. Misclick and carry on instead of starting again.
Calibrate, don’t trust
If a drawing has been photocopied or printed to a non-standard size, the printed scale ratio is a lie. Calibrate the page against a known dimension instead.
A field can collect measurements across many pages of one drawing, but it cannot span two different drawings — so it is never ambiguous which drawing a quantity came from when someone queries it.
A closer look at Take-Off
The parts of the screen that do the work.
What it connects to
Nothing in SmarteBuild is an island — that is the point of it. Take-Off reads from and feeds into these.
Bill of Quantities
The costed spine of the job — items, rates, markups and margin
Documents & Drawings
Every revision in one place, attached to the job automatically
Cost Centres & WBS
Structure a job once and reuse it on every job after it
Projects & Costings
Contract stages, markups and the numbers behind every job
Want the detail?
The help centre documents Take-Off step by step, with worked examples — written for people using it, not for a brochure.
Start with one job and see
Try the whole thing free for 30 days. No credit card to start, and no lock-in contract.