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 estimate'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.
Six 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. The sixth is a tape measure for when you just want to know how long something is.
| 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 |
| Ruler | U | Click along a run, double-click to finish | A quick check — nothing is saved and no field is needed |
If the designer has already modelled it, stop measuring it off a picture of it
A PDF is a photograph of a building. The model it was printed from knows every wall is 230 brick, how long each one is and where the openings are — and then we hand the estimator the photograph and ask them to trace it back.
Open the IFC straight from the same place you open a drawing. Every design program exports one: Revit, ArchiCAD, Vectorworks. The middle of the screen becomes the model, the left becomes a list of what is in it — walls, slabs, doors and rooms, grouped by type — and clicking a type lights it up in the model and shows its figures. Send to field puts any of them into a take-off field, where the formulas and the bill of quantities read it exactly as they read something you traced.
It shows you its working, and lets you disagree with the file
The figures are worked out from the shapes in the model, with openings taken out, and the gross figure is there beside it. In the picture above, one wall type across fifty-three elements comes to 345.55 m² net against 384.07 m² gross — the thirty-eight square metres between them being the doors and windows. Where the design program has written its own figure into the file and it disagrees with the shapes, you are shown both and you choose which one to send.
That is the difference between a number you can defend and a number you inherited. An estimator who cannot say where a quantity came from cannot argue about it later.
Three clips, a little over a minute, on a real architect's model
Not the tidy sample house — a two-storey house as its architect modelled it, 495 elements and 42 rooms, with the designer's own type names still on everything.
The two revisions in these recordings were made by leaving a few elements out of the same model, so you are watching the tool work rather than a real design change on a real job. No sound — every point is made in the writing above.
The revision arrives, and you find out what it did to your price
Open a newer version of the same model and it tells you which of your fields were filled from the earlier one, and how many of those figures have moved. Review and update lists them side by side — what each field was, what it is now, and the difference — with the changed ones ticked. One button updates them.
Nothing changes by itself, and that is deliberate. A quantity you typed over by hand is flagged and left alone. A field you measured on a PDF is never touched. A type that is no longer in the model keeps the quantity it had rather than silently going to zero.
Compare with puts two revisions on top of each other: what was added in teal, what changed in orange, what was removed drawn faintly where it used to stand, and a list of every affected type with its totals before and after. The question "what did that revision actually cost me" stops being a morning's work.
Where this is today. It has been through a hand-verified sample house and one real architect's Revit export of a two-storey house, which came in with its figures looking right. It has not been put through a large commercial model, or an ArchiCAD export, so treat your first one as something to look over rather than to trust. Fields are matched to the model by type name, so a renamed type reads as one that has gone. If the design program gives every element a new identity on export, a comparison shows everything as added and removed — it says so when that happens, and the per-type totals are still right. There is no Revit plug-in, no take-off from DWG, and no clash detection.
Quantities from Revit, without measuring them twice
Ask for the IFC first — the model above is the better end of this. But designers do not always hand one over, and a schedule is easier to get out of some offices than a model is.
When the architect works in Revit, the quantities already exist. In Revit the designer exports a schedule — File › Export › Reports › Schedule, from a material take-off or a multi-category schedule with one row per type and its count, length or area — and you import that file here.
You match each Revit type to a take-off field, and the field takes the schedule's figure as a typed quantity, marked as coming from Revit so nobody later mistakes it for something traced on the plan. The formulas and the bill of quantities read it exactly as they read a measured field. Everything the model does not cover — the things that never appear in it, and the allowances — you still measure off the PDF alongside.
What that slab costs, while you are still drawing it
Press the $ button above the fields list and every field shows what the bill of quantities items priced off it come to at the quantity you have measured so far. Trace one more room and the figure moves. It is off by default, and it is only offered to people allowed to see costs — an estimator sees it, a site supervisor does not.
That matters at the sharp end of a tender. The question is rarely "how many square metres" and almost always "are we over". Measuring and pricing in the same window means you find out while you can still do something about the specification, rather than two hours later when the bill is finally built.
The same panel takes an assembly kit from the bill of quantities — a set of priced items driven by one measurement. Add the kit, draw the shape, and the concrete, the mesh, the pump hire and the labour all take their quantity from it at once.
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.
Roofs are measured flat and priced true. Give the field its pitch — 22.5°, say — and the plan area you traced comes back as the real surface area. You never trace a roof twice or reach for a pitch table.
One field can feed another. Point a field at the one above it, with a factor if it needs one, and it keeps itself up to date — so a sarking field that is always the roof area, or a waste field that is a share of the slab, is set once rather than remeasured.
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
One register, proper revisions, formal issue and a record of who has what
-
Cost Codes & WBS
Structure a job once and reuse it on every job after it
-
Projects & Estimates
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.