Product Review – General Industries

I am a Senior estimator for a general contractor in south western PA. I first learned about eTakeoff from McGraw Hill and signed up for the free 30 day trial. Having used other on screen takeoff programs, I found eTakeoff to be very user friendly and after about a week of using the program and some initial support from eTakeoff’s support team, we decided to buy the software package.

Since we do a large amount of design build projects we often only receive a basic footprint of the building with no scale attached. eTakeoff makes it very easy to set custom scales, all I need is a dimension and I can quickly and accurately takeoff the concrete, asphalt paving, site work and building area using the custom scale setting. I found that once I had built my customized traces that I most commonly use, I am able to quickly do my takeoffs and copy the quantities from the measurement list to my excel pricing sheet. This saves a lot of time by not having to type things twice.

I also have found their support staff to be very user friendly with timely response. I have recommended this product to some of my sub-contractors as well. Since most of our drawings are now in PDF format it saves them time and money in printing cost when I email them drawings for a project to bid. So if you are looking for ways to cut your estimating time and save money also, then I would highly recommend this product.