You know the Monday feeling. A 300-sheet set lands in your inbox, the bid is due Friday, and before you can price anything you have to read every page, pull a scope sheet, count symbols across sheets that don’t agree with each other, and build a takeoff clean enough to stand behind. That first pass, the reading and the counting and the scope-sheet build, is a full day of work before you’ve made a single pricing decision. On a busy week it’s the reason the third bid doesn’t get submitted.
An electrical sub we work with used to spend about an hour per sheet on that first pass. On a 16-sheet job that’s most of two days gone before pricing starts. With the agent doing the first read, they’ve clocked 2 to 4 hours saved on a typical takeoff and 4 to 6 hours saved on a single job. At a fully loaded rate of about $65/hr (a real customer’s own math: $50/hr plus 30% burden), that’s roughly $130 to $390 back on every takeoff, and it’s the difference between two bids out the door and three.
Here is what estimators actually hand the agent this week, in their own words.
The scope sheet, filled by division
The most common ask, by a wide margin, is scope-sheet build straight off the plans. Real requests from this week:
“here are the plans. develop a scope sheet using the attached template for divisions 21, 22, 23, 26, and 28. Create a separate sheet for each division.”
“i want you to scrub through it and give me conduit requirements. minimum sizes, fitting types, and where complete conduit pathways are required on low voltage scopes.”
You drop in your own blank template and the set. You get back division-by-division scope sheets with page references, so when a GC asks “where does it say that,” you have the citation. The template stays yours, the agent just fills it. Reading a spec set for scope items by hand is the roughly-one-hour task that now runs in minutes, and that hour is the one you were going to skip to make the deadline.
Takeoff to a priced ROM, in one thread
The second-biggest pull is takeoff plus a rough-order-of-magnitude number, in the estimator’s own pricing:
“Provide a takeoff and give me cost per nyc pricing”
“Quantify it, count penetrations and pull membrane/flashing/counterflashing areas off A2-01, base scope plus the 2,000 SF addition.”
The agent counts and quantifies, then applies your unit costs, including a localized rate when you say “your numbers are low for union NYC” and hand it the right basis. A structural sub we work with cut beam takeoffs by 25 to 30% and turned a 3-day manual takeoff into about a day, which frees roughly two days per bid to chase the next one. That’s not a faster spreadsheet. That’s another bid you can actually submit.
Count and label the whole set, per sheet and job total
The third pattern is raw counting, the part everyone hates:
“i have the full electrical set for this job, count and label all the assets across every sheet. give me per-sheet totals as well as job totals.”
“There are a lot of symbols for duplex receptacles, can you tell me which you have found in the legend?”
You get a marked-up PDF and a count roster, per sheet and per job, with the legend reconciled. One electrical estimating team went from about 2 hours per sheet on lighting takeoffs to seconds, and was pulling a usable takeoff about 30 minutes after first login. The savings compound: an hour a sheet across a full set is the whole reason the counting used to eat your Monday.
What this changes for you
The through-line across every estimator ask this week is the same. The agent takes the mechanical first pass, the reading, the counting, the scope-sheet fill, so your hours go to the judgment calls that actually need you: which assumptions to carry, where the drawings and specs disagree, what number you’re willing to sign. You don’t get fewer estimators. You get the capacity to say yes to the third bid.
If you’re an estimator, the fastest way to feel it is to drop one real plan set into the agent and ask for a scope sheet on your own template. First usable output tends to land inside half an hour.
