T TakeOn
Schedule a demo
Back to Field Notes

· features · case study

Template properties: how a contractor saved 40% of estimating time

A worked example of templates, value lists, conditional fields, and property-based grouping on a real lighting takeoff.

The single feature that converts the most estimators to TakeOn isn’t the collaboration. It isn’t Find Similar. It’s templates with real properties.

To explain why, here’s a worked example from an actual contractor’s bid — a 40,000 sqft commercial remodel with about 180 lighting fixtures across four floors, twelve fixture types, three voltages, and a dozen branch circuits. We’ll do the takeoff two ways: the way Bluebeam encourages, and the way TakeOn encourages. Then we’ll talk about the time the estimator actually saved (about 40%, hence the title) and why.

Names are anonymized at the estimator’s request, but the job and the numbers are real.

The job

  • 40,000 sqft, four floors, commercial remodel.
  • Roughly 180 lighting fixtures.
  • Twelve distinct fixture types (Type A through Type L).
  • Three voltages (120, 277, and a small handful of low-voltage tracks).
  • Twelve branch circuits (L-1 through L-12).
  • Three mount styles: recessed, surface, pendant.

The deliverable was a BOM split by fixture type, with subtotals by voltage and by circuit. Standard request from the GC’s estimating spreadsheet — not exotic.

The old way (Bluebeam tool sets)

The estimator’s previous workflow used Bluebeam tool sets. Each fixture type got its own symbol in the tool set — twelve symbols total, one per type. Counting the plan meant clicking each symbol in turn (Type A, then Type B, then Type C, etc.), then reading the per-symbol count off the markup list.

The problem was the cross-cutting breakdowns. The GC wanted subtotals by voltage and by circuit, not just by type. Bluebeam tool sets don’t carry properties — a symbol is a symbol, and it doesn’t know what voltage or circuit it’s on. So the estimator did what every Bluebeam estimator does: kept a side spreadsheet with twelve rows, one per type, and filled in voltage and circuit columns by hand.

Two problems with this. First, the spreadsheet and the plan are different files, edited at different times. A typo in either breaks the BOM, and you won’t catch it until the GC asks. Second, every time the plan revs — and on a 40k sqft remodel, plans rev — you re-do both. Re-count the plan, re-fill the spreadsheet, hope they match.

Estimated time for the original takeoff using this workflow: about 6.5 hours, including the spreadsheet reconciliation. About 30% of that was the spreadsheet work, not the actual counting.

The TakeOn way

In TakeOn, fixture counts and the BOM live in the same place — the plan — because annotations carry properties. The setup for this job was a single template:

Template: Lighting Fixture
  Type      (value list: A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · J · K · L · M)
  Voltage   (value list: 120 · 277 · low-voltage)
  Circuit   (sticky text)
  Mount     (value list: recessed · surface · pendant)

One template. Four properties. Six minutes to define it from scratch.

Counting the plan meant picking the Lighting Fixture template and clicking each fixture. For each new fixture group, the estimator changed the Type, Voltage, Mount, and Circuit fields before clicking. The Circuit property was marked sticky, so once set, it carried forward to the next placement until the estimator changed it. That alone removed maybe a third of the keystrokes — most of the time, several fixtures in a row share a circuit.

Here’s where it gets interesting. As the annotations landed, the right-side takeoffs panel showed groups appear automatically:

Lighting Fixture · Type A · 277V · L-1   ·  recessed     ·  12 ea
Lighting Fixture · Type A · 277V · L-3   ·  recessed     ·   8 ea
Lighting Fixture · Type B · 277V · L-1   ·  surface      ·   6 ea
Lighting Fixture · Type B · 120V · L-7   ·  pendant      ·   4 ea
Lighting Fixture · Type C · 277V · L-1   ·  recessed     ·  18 ea
...

The estimator never had to ask the BOM to group this way. Same template, different property values = different group, different color on the canvas, different running count. The plan and the BOM are the same artifact.

A small but important detail: conditional and bracket-name

Two property-system features made this faster than it sounds.

Conditional properties. The original template definition included a Track length property that only matters for low-voltage track lighting. Marking it conditional on Voltage = low-voltage meant the property panel showed it only when the estimator was actually placing a track fixture. For everything else, the panel had four fields instead of five. Less to look at, less to mis-fill.

Bracket-name formatting. The template’s name format was set to Type [Type] [Voltage]V L-[Circuit]. With one click, every annotation got a label like Type C 277V L-1 baked in. That label is what shows on the canvas, in the takeoff, and in the exported BOM. No one had to type a single label string by hand.

These aren’t headline features. They’re the kind of thing you notice on the second day, when you realize you haven’t typed 277 once.

The export

The export-to-Excel button produced a spreadsheet with columns: Plan, Name, Qty, Unit, Type, Voltage, Circuit, Mount. One row per group. The GC’s estimating spreadsheet accepted it directly — no reconciliation, no copy-paste.

When the addendum came in (it always does), the estimator restored a saved checkpoint of the pre-addendum state, ran the updated plan side-by-side using overlay, and exported a diff. The change order was priced from a real quantity-delta document, not from memory.

The numbers

Pre-TakeOn, this kind of job took the estimator about 6.5 hours end to end, including the spreadsheet reconciliation.

In TakeOn, the same job took about 3.8 hours.

That’s the 40% in the title. Breaking it down: about half came from the spreadsheet step disappearing entirely. The other half came from the property-grouping showing breakdowns the estimator used to compute by hand — voltage subtotals, circuit subtotals, mount-style splits.

The estimator’s words, lightly edited: “It’s not that any one thing got faster. It’s that I used to do counts twice — once on the plan, once in Excel — and now I do them once. That, and I didn’t fight the BOM.”

Setup vs. payoff

The honest pitch for this feature isn’t “you’ll be faster on day one.” It’s that the template setup is a one-time investment — maybe 15-30 minutes to build out a workspace’s worth of trade-specific templates — and after that, every subsequent job pays back at the rate of the spreadsheet step you no longer do.

For a shop doing fifteen bids a year, the math works out fast. For someone who’d run two or three takeoffs a year, the property system is probably overkill and Bluebeam tool sets are fine.

If you want to see the template system without committing to anything, schedule a demo and we’ll build one template together. That’s the whole pitch — there isn’t really a more complicated version of it.