Perfect Takeoff
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How it works

A plan set goes in. A priced bid comes out.

Most estimating tools ask you to trust a number. This one shows its work. Here is everything that happens between the PDF landing on your desk and the proposal going out — including the parts where you take over.

~10 minPDF in, priced bid out
3–6 hrsthe same job, counted by hand
Every devicemovable, and traceable to a rule
Perfect Takeoff analysing the third floor of a residential building: 46 devices placed across 10 dwelling units, with a live panel showing device counts by type, the code checks that passed, and a running material total.

Harborview Commons, Building A — third-floor fire alarm. 46 devices across 10 dwelling units, analysed in 21.4 seconds. Every figure on this page comes from this job.

Step by step

Five steps, and you are in charge of two of them.

Steps one to three take minutes and no input from you. Steps four and five are where your judgement goes in — which is deliberate. A takeoff you cannot argue with is not worth much.

1
About a minute

Drop in the plan set

Upload the PDF exactly as the architect issued it. No exporting sheets one at a time, no renaming, no splitting it into floors first.

Perfect Takeoff works out which sheets are architectural floor plans and which are schedules, details or title pages. It reads the drawing scale off the sheet, and it works out which level each plan belongs to — so a twelve-storey set arrives already sorted.

What you doPick the file. That is the whole step.
Read from the set
Sheets foundA2.01 – A2.12
Floor plans identified12 of 18
Drawing scale1/8" = 1'-0"
LevelsL1 – L12
Schedules & detailsskipped
2
The part that decides the count

It reads the building before it places anything

This is the step that separates a takeoff from a dot-counter. Code does not care how big a room is in the abstract — it cares whether that room is a dwelling unit, a corridor, a stairwell, an electrical room or a mechanical space, and what the building is classified as.

So before a single device lands, Perfect Takeoff resolves the occupancy classification, finds the dwelling units, traces the corridors, and closes the rooms. Get this wrong and every count downstream is wrong in a way that looks perfectly reasonable.

What you doNothing yet — but everything here is shown to you, and every one of these calls can be overridden before you price the job.
What it worked out
OccupancyR-2 residential
Appliedstrictest, building-wide
Dwelling units10 on this level
Corridortraced, 1 spine
Stairwells / elevator2 / 1
Which is why every unit gets
1 smoke detector 1 CO detector 1 multi-tone sounder …and nothing else
3
21.4 seconds on this level

Devices place themselves to NFPA 72

Smoke detectors, manual pulls, horn/strobes, speakers, duct detectors, monitor and control modules and the panel land on the drawing at the spacing the code asks for — with coverage drawn so you can see the reasoning rather than infer it.

Spacing is not applied uniformly. Ceiling height, corridor length, sleeping rooms, line of sight and the occupancy from step two all change what goes where, which is exactly why step two happens first.

What you doWatch it work, or go and do something else. It runs sheet by sheet.
Placed on this level
Smoke detector16
CO detector10
Multi-tone sounder10
Horn / strobe — wall6
Manual pull station2
Strobe1
Heat detector1
Level 3 total 46 devices
4
Your call, on every marker

You review — and you can ask why

Every device is draggable. Add one, delete one, move one six feet left because you know the owner put a soffit there. Nothing is locked.

More importantly, nothing is unexplained. Select any device and it will tell you which rule put it there and what it is covering. Select a room and it will tell you what it decided that room was. When you disagree, you are disagreeing with a stated reason rather than with a black box — and the bill of materials, the labor and the total all move with you as you go.

What you doThe estimating. This is the step the other four exist to protect.
Checks it reports back
  • ✓Exact rooms — 10 of 10 units carry 1 CO + 1 smoke + 1 multi-tone, and nothing else
  • ✓Corridor spacing — NFPA 72 run, candela laddered along the spine
  • ✓Scope honoured — hatched and Phase-2 zones left untouched
  • ✓Nothing guessed silently — 3 ambiguities flagged for your review rather than decided quietly
And it stays live
Move a deviceBOM recomputes
Change a unit costtotal recomputes
5
One click each

Price it, then send it

Labor is broken out by type — install, commissioning, design, CAD and project management — and each one can carry its own rate, because your PM does not bill what your CAD tech bills. Permit, sales tax, attic stock and margin all fold into a single total, and the number on your screen is the same number that reaches the customer's proposal. There is only one grand total in this product, deliberately.

Then pick a format. A branded client proposal in one of five styles with your logo on the cover, an AHJ submittal package, a one-line riser, or a CSV row ready for Salesforce or any other CRM.

What you doChoose a style and hit generate. Everything else is already filled in.
Harborview Commons · Level 3
Material — 46 devices$14,820.00
Labor · 5 types$9,880.00
Permit estimate$620.00
Sales tax on material$1,185.60
Total proposal $26,505.60
Export as
Client proposal AHJ submittal Riser Marked-up plan CRM row (CSV)
Why the count holds up

You should not have to take our word for it.

An estimate you cannot check is a liability, not a shortcut. Three things make this one checkable in the ten minutes you actually have.

Every device names its rule

Click a marker and it tells you what put it there — the spacing rule, the room type, the occupancy it inherited. When something looks wrong you can see whether the placement is wrong or the reading of the room is, which are two different fixes.

Code checks run and report

Sleeping-room coverage, corridor spacing, notification gaps, stairwell smokes, duct detection — each runs across the whole set and each one says pass or fail on the sheet it applies to. A gap is surfaced, not silently averaged away.

You have the final say, always

Nothing is locked, nothing is uneditable, and no number is computed somewhere you cannot see. Your licence is on the submittal, so the last decision on every device is yours.

What it saves

The same bid, with the afternoon back.

The time does not come from cutting corners. It comes from not counting the same dot twice, and from the price never living in a separate spreadsheet that has to be reconciled by hand.

By hand
3–6 hrs

Clicking through the plan set floor by floor, tallying on a pad, then rebuilding the price in a spreadsheet that never quite matches the count.

→
With Perfect Takeoff
~10 min

Upload, review, price, send — with the marked-up plan, the bill of materials and the proposal all built from the same source, so they cannot disagree.

Figures are illustrative for planning, not a guarantee. Time varies with the size and quality of the plan set. The ten-minute figure assumes a set that Perfect Takeoff can read cleanly and a review pass, not an untouched export.

And what it does not do

  • —It does not produce a stamped engineered design. Perfect Takeoff makes computer-assisted draft takeoffs for estimating and coordination. A licensed fire-protection engineer and the AHJ still review the work — as they would review yours.
  • —It does not replace your judgement on a difficult building. On an unusual set it will tell you what it is unsure about rather than guessing quietly, which is the behaviour you want at bid time.
  • —It does not read a bad scan well. A clean vector PDF from the architect is what it is built for; a photographed drawing set is not.
See it on your own plans

Bring a plan set you have already bid.

The fastest way to judge this is to run it against a job where you already know the right answer, and see where it agrees with you.

Try it now Request a demo