An estimator's assistant · roofing, cladding & specialty trades
It reads the plans and specs so you don't spend two days on them. It sorts incoming supplier quotes and files them against your rates. It drafts assemblies and bill lines for you to work from, and tells you where you should go out to market.
The judgement stays yours. It just clears the desk first.
Built by a commercial roofing and cladding contractor, on live tenders.
Two days gone reading documents before you can price a thing.
Three hundred pages of specification, a drawing register, and four addenda that quietly changed the build-up. Somebody has to read all of it, and it is always the person who should be estimating.
Supplier quotes land in every format except yours.
A PDF, a spreadsheet, a photo of a fax. Every one gets retyped into your rates by hand, and the one you forgot to update is the one that costs you the job.
The knowledge lives in one person's head.
Which assemblies go with which detail, what to allow for access, when to go out to market. That is years of experience, and a smaller outfit either has it or cannot bid the work.
It is an assistant, not an autopilot. It does the reading, the sorting and the donkey work, then hands the result to you to check and change. You are still the estimator — you just start from something instead of a blank sheet.
Drop in the drawings, specification, schedules and addenda. It comes back with a scope — what is in, what is out, what is unclear — instead of you spending two days with a highlighter. You correct anything it read wrong.
Forward the quote in whatever shape it arrived. It pulls out the lines, matches them to your rates, and shows you old price against new with a confidence on each match. No retyping. You tick what you want applied.
It builds the assembly from the detail — membrane, insulation, fixings, trims, labour — and lays out the bill in sections. A starting point you can pull apart, not a finished quote you have to trust.
It spots rates that have gone stale and materials you have never priced, then drafts the RFQ for you to send. It raises it. You decide whether it is worth the phone call.
Whatever it drafts, the money comes from your rates — never from a generic price book and never from a number it made up. If your library is thin in places, it says so and helps you fill the gap rather than papering over it.
Your build-ups stay yours: scoped to your business, never pooled with anyone else's, never used to train a model.
Nobody wants software that runs off and produces a quote in their name. Everything it does arrives as a suggestion sitting in front of you, and the safeguards are structural — built into the system, not asked for politely in a prompt.
If a rate or a quantity cannot be found, it is shown as a gap. It is never filled with a plausible-looking figure.
Nothing the assistant drafts affects a price until a person accepts that specific line. Reject one, keep the rest.
Once an estimate is final, the assistant cannot touch it. Re-running always mints a new revision alongside the old one.
Measured quantities are tagged with where the figure came from, so a reader can tell a scaled dimension from a calculated one.
Who changed what, when, and on whose confirmation. Including everything the assistant proposed and everything you turned down.
Separated per organisation. Not shared between customers, not sold, not used as training data. Export your library whenever you want it.
Estimating has always been guarded by experience. You either had the rate library, the assemblies and the instinct, or you could not bid the work. That is why a two-man roofing firm loses jobs to an outfit with a full estimating department rather than to a better price.
This lowers that wall. It is built for roofing, cladding, facades, waterproofing and sheet metal — and it is as useful on your first estimate as on your thousandth.
Ask it for a warm roof build-up and it comes back with the membrane, insulation, vapour control, fixings, trims and labour — as a draft assembly you can edit, delete from, or throw away. The trade knowledge is in the box.
Start with whatever rates you have, even if that is a short list. Every supplier quote you feed in gets read, matched and added, so the book grows as a by-product of quoting rather than as a winter project you never get to.
Each drafted line says where the number came from and why that assembly was chosen. A newer estimator gets a second opinion on every job, which is how people actually learn the trade.
Where the documents are unclear or your rates do not cover something, it raises the question instead of quietly picking a number. Those are the questions an experienced estimator would have asked anyway.
One person can run more tenders in a week without hiring, and without the quality dropping on the ones that matter. Bid the jobs you have been turning down.
It runs in the browser. No server, no licences to shuffle, no IT person. Your work lives in a database rather than in a spreadsheet on somebody's laptop.
Your library is yours on the way in and on the way out.
No, and that is deliberate. It clears the work nobody wants — reading documents, sorting quotes, laying out assemblies, chasing stale prices — and hands you a draft to work from. Pricing a job is a judgement call about risk, access, programme and who you are bidding against. Software should not be making that call, and this one does not.
Send it the quote in whatever form it arrived — PDF, spreadsheet, or a photograph of a printout. It reads the lines, matches each one against your existing rates, and shows you a side-by-side of the old price and the new one with a confidence on every match. Anything it is unsure about is marked rather than applied. You tick what goes in.
Yes — that is a large part of why it exists. It suggests the assemblies that normally go with a given detail, raises the questions an experienced estimator would have asked, and explains where every number came from. You still make the decisions, but you are not making them from a blank page with nobody to check your thinking.
No. Your library sits in your own business's space. It is not pooled with other customers, not visible to them, and not used to train any model. You can export the whole thing at any time.
You see it before it counts. Everything it produces is a suggestion until you accept it, and anything it could not resolve is shown as an open gap rather than a filled-in guess. Rejecting a line costs you one click and leaves the rest of the draft intact.
No. It is built on the structures the trade already uses — resources, assemblies, sections, bill items, margin tiers. If you have worked in a proper estimating package before, the shape of it will be familiar on day one. If you have only ever used spreadsheets, it will look like a tidier version of what you were already doing.
Takeoff is in build. Today it reads the documents, drafts the scope and the assemblies, and you supply the measured quantities. When takeoff lands, every measured figure will carry a source tag and still need your confirmation before it prices — the same rule as everything else.
Import from spreadsheet. Large libraries import in chunks and resume if interrupted, and duplicates are caught on the way in. If you are starting from very little, supplier quotes will build it up for you as you quote. For bigger migrations we will do it with you.
Send us a real set of tender documents. We will load whatever rates you have, run it through, and you can see what it comes back with before you decide anything. Thirty minutes, no slide deck.
We reply personally. No sequences, no drip campaign.