Material estimating can be one of the most tedious yet critical tasks for builders and remodelers. It’s a familiar task: printing plans, using a ruler and calculator to measure based on the scale, and with notebook at my side, manually calculating the quantities needed for each project.
Then a few hours spent Googling and making phone calls to assemble pricing. Estimating always meant sitting down for several hours per project to figure these things out. If clients changed their minds, then you were literally back at the drawing board.
After a few years of this, I decided to try to improve the process using Excel spreadsheets with formulas to help do some of the math. I created a spreadsheet containing prices of frequently used materials. I even created a specialized one just for bathroom remodels. This was an improvement but still meant a lot of manual data entry, and the chance for making mistakes was high.
As my workload increased and my crew grew larger, I knew I needed to spend less time doing material take-offs. By chance I stumbled onto Stack. While doing a full-access free trial, I quickly realized that the cloud-based software was a robust solution to increase the ease, speed, and accuracy of material take-offs.
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