Industries / Concrete, masonry & finishes
Quantity times production rate. Everything else is detail.
Concrete, masonry, drywall and plaster contractors don’t assemble other people’s numbers — you price your own material and your own crews off measured quantities. Which means the takeoff is the estimate, and the production rates behind it decide whether the job makes money. The database has to model both.
What’s different here
What makes estimating different here.
Your quantities are the estimate
A GC can absorb a takeoff error inside a sub’s lump sum. You can’t — cubic yards, square feet of wall, and linear feet of footing flow straight into your number. Takeoff accuracy and estimate accuracy are the same thing.
Production rates decide the margin
A crew places so many yards a day, hangs so many square feet, finishes so many more. Those rates shift with height, access, layout complexity, and finish level — and the database needs a place to carry a condition factor.
One scope, many operations
Concrete isn’t a line item: it’s forming, rebar, embeds, placing, finishing, curing and stripping. Drywall is framing, hanging, taping, finishing to a level, then texture. Priced as a single blended unit rate, you can’t see which operation is losing money.
Waste and finish level move the number
Overpour, cut waste, breakage, and mortar are real cost, and a Level 5 finish is not a Level 4 at the same square foot. Buried inside a unit price these disappear; they should be inputs an estimator can see and adjust.
How we set it up
What the implementation includes.
Kickoff to live in weeks, not months, using the internal tools we’ve built for implementation.
- A database organized by operation — form, place, finish; hang, tape, finish — so margin is visible per activity rather than blended into one rate
- Crew definitions and production rates built from your own completed job costs, not published averages
- Condition factors for height, access, complexity, and specified finish level, so estimators adjust conditions instead of fudging hours
- Waste, overage, and breakage carried as explicit inputs rather than hidden inside unit pricing
- Material pricing structured for periodic updates — cement, gypsum, CMU, rebar and mortar all move independently
- Area, linear, and volume takeoff wired straight into the database, so a quantity is measured once
What you’ll likely run
The tools that carry the most weight here.
Starting databases
Database marketplace →Tell us how your team estimates.
We’ll tell you whether your setup needs configuring, rebuilding, or something written from scratch.
- Response time
- One business day, usually the same day.