What Take-Off is, and your first measurement

Take-Off lets you measure quantities straight off a PDF drawing — counts, lengths, areas — and feed them into your Bill of Quantities. Measure a slab once, and the BOQ item priced against it follows every change you make.

Why it’s different from a scale rule

Traditionally, taking off means measuring quantities from drawings with a scale rule and writing them into a dimension book. Take-Off does the same job on screen: you open the drawing, tell it what scale the sheet is at, and click along the things you want to measure.

The important part is what happens next. A measurement doesn’t just produce a number on the page — it goes into a take-off field, and BOQ items can take their quantity from that field. Add a room to your area, and the concrete, the mesh, the formwork and everything else priced against that field all move with it. Nothing to re-enter, nothing to remember.

In short: you measure once, and everything that depends on the measurement stays correct.

Before you start

You need three things:

• Access. Take-Off is still being rolled out, so it is not in every account’s menu yet. If you cannot see it, contact SmarteBuild — it is switched on company by company, and it is not something your own administrator can enable.
• Costing access. Take-Off works within one costing at a time, and measures into that costing’s fields. If you can open the costing’s BOQ, you can measure into it.
• A PDF in Documents. Take-Off reads drawings from the current costing’s Documents area. Upload the drawing there first — any PDF will do, of any number of pages.

A note on scanned drawings

Take-Off works on scans as happily as on native PDFs, but a scan is only as accurate as the scan itself. If a drawing has been photocopied or printed to a non-standard size, don’t trust the printed scale ratio — calibrate the page instead. See Setting the scale.

The four steps, every time

Every take-off you ever do is these four steps in this order.

Step 1 — Open the drawing

Take-Off opens with the last drawing you were working on in this costing, so most of the time there is nothing to do. The first time, choose Open PDF and pick your drawing.

The picker groups drawings by their Documents folder and shows the revision number of each. Superseded revisions are hidden by default — tick Show superseded if you need to look at an older one.

Page thumbnails appear down the left. Each shows the page’s scale, and a badge with the number of measurements on it.

Step 2 — Set the scale

Choose the ratio from the Scale dropdown in the toolbar — 1:50, 1:100, 1:200 and so on. If the drawing isn’t at a standard ratio, or you don’t trust it, use Custom… and calibrate against a known dimension.

Scale is set per page, not per drawing. A 1:20 detail and a 1:200 site plan routinely live in the same PDF, and Take-Off handles that properly.

Step 3 — Choose a take-off field

The panel on the right lists the take-off fields in this costing, grouped by assembly. Click one to make it active — that is where your measurements will land.

No suitable field yet? New field creates one without leaving the drawing.

Step 4 — Measure

Pick a tool and start clicking. The field’s total updates as you go, and so does every BOQ item priced against it.

Tutorial: taking off a small house slab

Here is that sequence run all the way through on a real job. We will take off three quantities from a single floor plan — the slab area, the external wall length, and a door count — and price BOQ items against them.

Assume you have a costing open with a floor plan called A-101 Floor Plan Rev B already uploaded to Documents, drawn at 1:100.

1. Open the drawing and check the scale

Open Take-Off from the module menu, then Open PDF and choose A-101 Floor Plan Rev B.

The title block says 1:100, so pick 1:100 from the Scale dropdown. Before you trust it, check it: the plan has a figured dimension of 12 000 along the rear wall. Use the Line tool to drag along it and confirm you get 12.0 m. If you get something else, the sheet has been resized — go to Custom… and calibrate instead.

Always check one figured dimension

It takes ten seconds and catches the single most expensive mistake in take-off: a whole job measured at the wrong scale. Every quantity would be wrong by the same factor, and nothing on screen would look unusual.

2. Create a field for the slab

In the fields panel, click New field:

Setting	Value
Name	Slab area
Unit	M2
Assembly	Concrete

Click Create. The field appears in the panel with a total of 0.00 m² and a colour assigned to it.

3. Measure the slab

With Slab area selected, press A for the Area tool and click each corner of the slab outline. Hold Shift as you go — the walls are square, and this keeps your lines square too.

At the last corner, press Enter. Take-Off closes the shape back to your first point automatically.

The field total now reads something like 186.40 m². If you misclicked a corner on the way round, Ctrl+Z would have taken it back without losing the shape.

4. Measure the external walls

Create a second field:

Setting	Value
Name	External wall
Unit	M2
Default height	2.4
Assembly	Brickwork

Because the field has a default height, an M2 field will accept a length — Take-Off multiplies what you measure by 2.4 automatically.

Select the field, press P for Polyline, and click along the outside face of the external walls, corner to corner, all the way round. Press Enter to finish.

You clicked a 54.2 m perimeter; the field reads 130.08 m². You never typed 2.4 once.

5. Count the doors

Create a third field:

Setting	Value
Name	Internal doors
Unit	Each
Assembly	Carpentry

Select it, press C for Count, and click once on each internal door symbol. The total ticks up with each click. Miscounted one? Switch to Select (V), click the stray marker, press Del — the rest are untouched, because every count click is its own measurement.

6. Price the BOQ against your fields

Go to the Bill of Quantities. On your concrete item, open Calculate Quantity, choose the Fields tab, and pick Slab area. Do the same for the brickwork item against External wall, and the door item against Internal doors.

That is the round trip closed. Three fields, three items, and from here on the numbers look after themselves.

7. Prove it

Go back to Take-Off, select the slab area, and drag one corner out to add a 600 mm-deep alfresco you had missed. Return to the BOQ.

The concrete quantity has already changed. There is no export step, no recalculation to trigger and no cache to clear.

Where to go next

• Setting the scale — calibration, and what to do with a scan
• The measurement tools — all four tools, editing, and arcs for curved walls
• Take-off fields and the BOQ — units, heights, depths, and how a quantity reaches an item