Estimating Construction Materials the Easy Way

Journal of Light Construction

Material estimating can be one of the most tedious yet critical tasks for contractors. It’s a familiar task: printing plans, using a ruler and calculator to measure based on the scale, and with notebook at your 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, Jon Beer of Jon Beer Contracting decided to try to improve the process using Excel spreadsheets with formulas to help do some of the math. He created a spreadsheet containing prices of frequently used materials. He 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 his workload increased and his crew grew larger, he knew he needed to spend less time doing material take-offs. By chance he said he stumbled onto Stack. While doing a full-access free trial, Beer quickly realized that the cloud-based software was a robust solution to increase the ease, speed and accuracy of material take-offs.

To get started, you log in to the website, create a new project and upload a set of plans. Stack has some intelligent code that will read the title block and auto-organize the sheets for you. The program works directly off plans—so you measure directly on top of the drawings. Like most software, when you open it up for the first time, it can feel a bit overwhelming. But Stack comes loaded with a robust item-and-assembly catalog to get you estimating as quickly as possible.

To read the rest of this story from our partner publication, JLC, click here.