Construction

Takeoff, quoting, and supplier RFQs in one construction desk

A construction estimator's week lived in PDFs, Excel, and the inbox. Plans arrived as drawings or a loose BOM. Someone typed materials into a sheet, guessed quantities, emailed three suppliers, and pasted replies back into another tab. There was no single place that showed what had been extracted, what had been approved, and which vendor had actually quoted.

Discuss a similar workflow

What was breaking

Takeoff accuracy depended on whoever had time to retype the drawing.
Quantities drifted between the spreadsheet, the quote, and the purchase order.
Supplier replies lived in email threads that nobody else could reconstruct.
The team was paying for separate tools for documents, estimating, and purchasing — and still copying between them.

What changed

Takeoff and purchasing share one record instead of two spreadsheets and an inbox.
Human review stays in the loop — AI never sends an RFQ on its own.
A new estimator can see why a quantity is on the quote, not just that it is there.

Custom app + AI extraction

What we built

Upload the plan, not a spreadsheet

Estimators drop construction PDFs — drawings, specs, or a BOM. The app keeps the source document attached to the job so later review can go back to the page, not a cell.

AI proposes the material list

A document pipeline extracts candidate line items with a confidence score and a page reference. The model proposes. The estimator accepts, edits, or rejects before anything becomes a quote.

One quote, then RFQs in a row

Approved materials become a structured quote. RFQs go to suppliers from the same record. Replies sit side-by-side on that job instead of being reconstructed from inboxes.

Questions about this build

Can AI do a construction takeoff from PDF plans?

It can propose one. The pipeline extracts candidate line items from drawings, specs, or a loose BOM, each with a confidence score and a page reference. That removes the retyping, not the judgement: the estimator accepts, edits, or rejects every line before it becomes a quote.

Does the estimator still control the quantities and the purchase order?

Yes. Nothing reaches a supplier without a person approving it, and the app never sends an RFQ on its own. Because the source document stays attached to the job, a reviewer can trace any quantity back to the page it came from rather than to a spreadsheet cell.

Do we have to replace our estimating or accounting software?

No. The point of this build was to remove the copying between documents, estimating, and purchasing, not to rip out working systems. Where an existing tool is the system of record, we connect to it and leave it in place.

How is this different from off-the-shelf construction takeoff software?

Off-the-shelf tools cover a step and charge a seat for it, which is how a team ends up with separate products for documents, estimating, and purchasing and still pastes between them. Here takeoff, quoting, and supplier RFQs share one record because the workflow was built as one thing.

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Have a workflow that looks like this?

Tell us the tools, spreadsheets, or legacy systems in the way. We will say whether it should become one custom app.

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