Take-offs and bills of quantities from your drawings

The measure is the slowest hour in construction

Every contractor knows the ritual. Print the drawings — or squint at them on a screen — and work across each one with a scale rule: lengths, areas, counts, transferred by hand into a spreadsheet that has grown its own habits over the years. It is slow, it is error-prone at the exact moment accuracy matters most, and it is almost always done at night, because daylight belongs to the jobs already won.

Miss a run on one drawing and the mistake compounds silently: the quantity is wrong, so the material order is wrong, so the price is wrong — and you discover it on site, where it is most expensive to fix.

How a Nexley take-off works

• Drop in the drawing PDFs. Architectural, structural or services layouts — whatever the pack contains, including revisions. No re-drawing, no tracing, no special file format.
• Ask for what you need, in plain words. “Measure the partitions on the first-floor plan” or “count the sockets on drawing 04, revision C”. If you are on site with your phone, say it as a voice note — the measure comes back the same way a colleague's would.
• Get itemised quantities, not a black box. Each line shows what was measured, from which drawing, in which unit. If a figure looks off, you trace it to the source in one step and correct it — the point is a measure you can defend, not one you must take on faith.
• The bill assembles itself around your rates. Quantities flow into an NRM2-structured bill of quantities with your labour and material rates against each item and provisional sums flagged where the drawings leave gaps. From there it is one step to a tender submission or a priced quote.

Why the format matters as much as the numbers

A main contractor's surveyor opens dozens of subcontractor bills a month. A tidy NRM2 structure with clean work sections reads as a firm that knows what it is doing; a homemade spreadsheet with merged cells reads as risk. The same quantities, presented properly, get taken more seriously — and when the valuation argument comes mid-contract, a bill with traceable measured quantities is the document you want to be holding.

Take-offs and bills are included in the single Nexley plan — no per-drawing charge, no per-bill charge, and a 7-day free trial to run it on a real tender pack first. If you currently farm measurement out, the comparison with hiring a QS sets out fairly what changes and what does not.