The agent team takes off quantities from the plans and prices them against a live cost catalog, so an estimate that ate your evening becomes a same-day number you can stand behind.
The cost
Counting fixtures and linear feet off the plans, building a fresh Excel tab, then waiting on supplier callbacks for pricing is sequential, manual, and uninterruptible. The takeoff is the slow part of the night, so the count caps how many invitations you can answer -- you triage down to the few you can hand-build, and the rest expire unbid.
Because the takeoff lives in your head and a spreadsheet, pricing lives in a voicemail, and the bid is a file named v3_FINAL_use_this, nothing carries forward. The next plan set means re-count, re-call, re-price, re-build from zero -- the same labor spent again with no compounding asset to show for the last ten bids.
A fat-fingered unit cost or a stale supplier quote ships inside the bid, and when the award is questioned there is no line-by-line history of who changed what. An overwritten Excel file has no audit trail -- you cannot prove the basis of the number, only re-open the spreadsheet and hope.
Today vs ConniXT
Open the plans at 6 p.m., count by hand, build a takeoff in a blank tab, call suppliers for pricing and wait on callbacks, assemble line items, and overwrite the prior bid file. The number is a guess under deadline, the history is gone the moment you hit save, and the next invitation starts the loop over.
The estimating agent and the plan takeoff classify the plan documents into takeoff line items on an approve-or-review loop -- you confirm the count instead of producing it. Every change lands as a versioned estimate on a branch, comparable line for line, and bids are leveled by merging branches, not by reconciling spreadsheets.
How ConniXT ends it
The plan takeoff turns a plan design into a versioned takeoff of activities and resources you can clone and activate, and the estimating agent runs its estimate passes -- cost, specification and benchmark checks among them -- under graduated autonomy, where every run is approved or rejected before it lands. The takeoff is generated; you confirm it.
See the pack →Every change to a bid is proposed as its own reviewed change -- create a merge request, preview the merge result, approve or reject, then execute the merge. Because each change is kept as its own version, the bid is reconstructable line-for-line and the basis of the number survives the award being questioned, instead of vanishing into an overwritten file.
See the pack →Who owns this
The trade contractor whose evening is the takeoff. Automating the count-and-price loop to a same-day review lets you bid the full set of invitations and lift your hit rate by entering more of them -- without longer nights.
See the role →The role that lives in active bids, deadlines, and vendor quotes. The estimating agent and the plan takeoff move the manual classification off the desk so the estimator confirms quantities and levels bids instead of hand-building each one.
See the role →The GC leveling subcontractor bids at the table. When every estimate is versioned and diffable on the same provenance, bid leveling is a comparison of records, not a reconciliation of mismatched spreadsheets.
See the role →The resource-role workspace for estimating -- active bids, awarded and lost, deadlines, vendor quotes, and pipeline forecast -- where the takeoff-to-bid loop actually runs day to day.
See the seat →Where the priced takeoff becomes committed spend -- RFP cycle, vendor quotes, open POs, and savings -- so the number you bid is the number the supply chain is qualified to fulfill.
See the seat →The full Pain Solution Library -- find the ones that run your day.