Pr3ciseConstruction takeoff services, wherever you are building
Quantity and material takeoffs measured off your drawings, traceable sheet by sheet, in Excel and PDF — coded to CSI MasterFormat, NRM, or the way your own market measures.
Most people looking for construction takeoff services have a drawing set, a tender date, and an estimator already pricing two other jobs. They need the measurement done properly, in a form the rest of the bid can be built on.
That is the whole service. You send the drawings, engineers measure them, and the quantities come back with markups showing where every number came from. No rates attached unless you ask, and nothing rolled into a lump sum to cover a gap.
We are a remote estimating office working in English and Spanish for contractors in the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, the Gulf and the rest of Europe. Every takeoff is produced by one engineer and checked by a second — how the office works — and you can read real deliverables in our sample estimates and takeoffs.
What a construction takeoff is, and where it stops
A takeoff is the measurement stage: how much of each item the drawings contain, in its proper unit — square metres or square feet, linear metres or feet, cubic metres or cubic yards, tonnes, each. Nothing is priced. The output is a schedule of quantities, not money.
An estimate is that same measurement with cost attached: labour, material, equipment, waste, overhead and profit. The two words get used interchangeably, and it causes arguments: a contractor who asked for a quantity takeoff and received a priced document has been handed somebody else's rates for his own labour force.
Buy the takeoff alone when you already hold good rates, when your subcontractors price the work and only need to know how much there is, or when you are auditing somebody else's number. Buy the priced version when you want the whole bid built — that is our estimating and quantity surveying services. A takeoff has the virtue of being checkable: anyone can open the marked-up sheet, find the shape and confirm the number — which is exactly what our guide on how to review a contractor’s estimate walks through, line by line.
What gets measured, trade by trade
Every trade has its own units, and its own habitual omissions — the ones that cost money.
Concrete, masonry and rebar
Volumes by mix and pour, formwork as contact area rather than floor area, rebar by bar mark converted to weight, blockwork by unit size.
Structural steel and framing
Members scheduled individually and totalled by weight, connections and base plates counted, stud partitions by length with gauge and height kept apart.
Electrical
Devices and fixtures counted off the schedules, branch circuits by conductor size, conduit by diameter and run type, gear and transformers listed as equipment.
Plumbing and piping
Underground measured apart from above-ground: different crews, different risk. Pipe by material and diameter, fittings and valves counted, fixtures from the schedule.
Mechanical and HVAC
Ductwork by surface area converted to sheet weight by gauge, equipment counted by tag, grilles and diffusers by type, hangers and insulation measured not allowed for.
Envelope, finishes and sitework
Openings from the door and window schedules, glazing by area and type, roofing by assembly, drywall by face, earthwork by cut and fill.
One trade or the whole building. If the job needs pricing too, the full range of estimating services covers the same trades with rates attached.
Deliverable formats: Excel, PDF and the coding your market tenders in
- An Excel workbook and a PDF of the same content. One row per measured item, quantity, unit and sheet reference in their own columns, so you can filter it, pivot it or send a trade out to a supplier.
- The marked-up drawings. Every measured shape colour-coded on the sheet it came from. That is what makes a quantity auditable: pick a line, find the shape.
- CSI MasterFormat coding for North American work, division by division, so the takeoff drops into the structure your bid and accounting software already expects.
- NRM2 or SMM measurement for United Kingdom tenders, written up as a bill of quantities with the descriptions a quantity surveyor expects — or NRM1 at cost-plan stage.
- Mediciones in the Spanish convention — capítulos and partidas, each partida carrying its measurement lines with the uds × long × anch × alt breakdown.
- A bill of quantities for Gulf tenders, measured to POMI or NRM2 as the documents require — what most FIDIC-based contracts in the United Arab Emirates run on.
- Imperial or metric, your choice, consistent throughout, plus a written scope and exclusion list: what was measured, what was not, what the drawings left ambiguous.
If you have your own template, send it — fitting a takeoff into a form your team already reads beats anything we would choose.
How to send us the drawings
The only thing that genuinely delays a takeoff is a missing schedule, so the first step asks for them by name.
Send the set
Email the PDFs to contact@pr3cise.com, or link to wherever they already live: a shared drive, a project portal, a transfer link. CAD and IFC are faster to measure, but nothing needs converting. Include specifications, addenda, schedules and your date.
Scope, fee and date in writing
We read the set before quoting, then confirm the scope, the fixed fee and the delivery date in writing. If your deadline is not realistic for the size of the set, we say so then, not later.
Measurement
Quantities come off the drawings on screen, sheet by sheet, each item colour-marked as it is taken. Areas, lengths, counts and volumes stay in their own units. Conflicts between sheets are logged, not assumed away.
Delivery and one revision
You get the workbook, the PDF and the marked-up drawings, with the assumptions and the question list. One revision round is included: an addendum, a scope change, a section re-measured.
What happens when the drawings are incomplete
Almost every set is incomplete somewhere. A schedule is missing, a dimension string stops halfway, the mechanical sheets show equipment the architectural sheets have no room for, or the specification names a product family and leaves the selection to the contractor. None of that stops a takeoff.
We measure everything the drawings genuinely answer and split the rest into two lists. Written assumptions, each attached to the items it affects so it is easy to overturn: tell us the partitions run to the slab rather than the ceiling grid, and those quantities are re-measured. And questions for the design team, written so you can forward them as an RFI.
What we never do is guess a quantity quietly and let it sit in the workbook looking measured. That is the most expensive habit in this trade: it hides risk exactly where a bid review would find it. We set out how it unravels in the risks of an inaccurate construction estimate.
Turnaround, and what a time zone actually buys you
A takeoff comes back in 24 to 72 hours. Which end depends on the set, not on what you are willing to pay: a single trade on a clean, fully scheduled set sits at the fast end, a full multi-trade package with coordination problems at the slow one. The date and the fixed fee are agreed before work starts — no hourly billing.
The time zone works for you. Our day starts seven hours before the United States East Coast and an hour before Madrid, so a set sent at the end of a North American afternoon is measured overnight; for clients in the Gulf our working day overlaps yours, and a question raised in the morning is answered the same afternoon. Which is why it is worth saying if the tender closes on Friday — we would rather decline than hand back a rushed measurement.
Takeoff services near you — which, in this trade, means anywhere
Measurement happens on the drawings, not on site. That is why takeoff services near me behaves differently here than for a plumber: it really asks whether a firm covers your market, knows the code your project is permitted under, and delivers in the format your tender demands.
We work for contractors across the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, the United Arab Emirates and the wider Gulf, and the rest of Europe, in English and Spanish. What changes between markets is not the measurement — a cubic metre of concrete is a cubic metre everywhere — but the classification, the units, the description conventions and the rules on what is measured net and what gross.
The United States is our largest English-language market, and South Florida is where most of that work sits: projects in Miami-Dade fall inside the High-Velocity Hurricane Zone, which changes assemblies and therefore quantities throughout a building, so it has its own page on construction estimating in Miami. That is a specialism, not a boundary — a job in Manchester, Madrid, Dubai or Warsaw gets the same method and the same two-engineer check. If you need a standing arrangement rather than one package, read the case for outsourced construction estimating.
Construction takeoff FAQs
A takeoff is the measurement: how much of each item the drawings contain, in its proper unit, with nothing priced. An estimate is that measurement with money attached — labour, material, equipment, waste, overhead and profit. If you already hold your own rates, or your subcontractors price the work, the takeoff alone is what you need.
However they already exist. Email a PDF set to contact@pr3cise.com, or send a link to wherever they live: a shared drive, a project portal, a file-transfer link. CAD and IFC are welcome and faster to measure. Scans work too, provided the sheet carries a scale bar or a dimension we can calibrate against.
Yes, and most sets are incomplete somewhere. We measure everything the drawings genuinely answer and return the rest as two short lists: written assumptions, each one easy to overturn, and questions for the design team. What we never do is guess a quantity silently and let it read as a measured one.
An Excel workbook you can filter and formula against, a PDF of the same content, and the marked-up drawings showing where each quantity came from. Coding follows your market: CSI MasterFormat for North America, NRM2 or SMM for a UK bill of quantities, capítulos y partidas for Spain, or your own bid template.
We work remotely for contractors in the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, the Gulf and the rest of Europe, in English and Spanish. Measurement happens on the drawings, not on site, so distance changes nothing — and a team several time zones ahead measures your set overnight.