Buying estimating software is mostly buying an implementation
The product matters, but what decides whether it works for you is how well it learns the way your business already prices a job.
So this page covers what happens after you sign. The two ways to start, the phases and what each one costs you in time, how we train your people, and where you go when something breaks.
Two ways to start
Start on our templates
TakeoffQS ships with templates we've built and refined ourselves across the common residential job types. You load your price book, calibrate the constants to the way you build, and start quoting. Anything that doesn't fit, you edit. For a builder with a clean scope, that's the whole setup.
Have us build it with you
Where the pricing logic is genuinely your own, we run a full implementation at a fixed fee agreed before we start. We sit with your estimators, get the rules out of their heads, build your template and price book around them, then hand it over. Merchants, prenail operations and anyone quoting off a spreadsheet a senior estimator spent years building all end up here.
Plenty of accounts land between the two. We'll tell you which one you are before you sign rather than after.
What the implementation actually looks like
Eight phases, and the middle three overlap. Nothing goes live until your test is passed.
This is how we run it as standard. Treat it as the starting point for a conversation rather than a fixed process, because we shape it around what you actually need.
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Kickoff
One day, on site, both teams in the room. We agree the starting slice of your work, who your Champions are, which systems we hand off to, and the test we'll be judged on. The test gets written down here with a pass mark you set. Nobody negotiates the finish line while standing on it.
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Capture
The phase most software rollouts skip, and the one that decides whether the numbers come out right. We work through real jobs with your estimators and get your pricing logic written down. How a raked ceiling gets measured off the plan. Which sheet widths you still use and which one was discontinued. How bracing gets split up and what drives the quantity. Everything we learn gets shown back to you, so you can see what the software is about to do before it does it.
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Configure
Your materials and price book loaded and mapped. Your assemblies and the rules that choose between them. Your quote output laid out the way your customers already expect to see it. Role-based access, so the right people see the right jobs. Anything that doesn't fit is one of three things: something we configure, something that goes into the product and ships to everyone, or something we're not doing. All three get written down.
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Calibrate
The test from kickoff, run for real. You give us plans your team has already quoted by hand, we run the same plans through TakeoffQS, and we put the two side by side line by line on accuracy and on time taken. Where they don't match we find out why. It's almost always a rule we got wrong or something the software failed to see on the drawing.
This is where we need volume from you. Scanned drawings, awkward jobs and old plans are more use to us than clean ones.
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Train
Champions get intensive time with us on the full product and on their own configuration, plus every question their team is likely to ask. They've been in the room through Capture and Calibrate, so this builds on what they already know. Everyone else gets shorter sessions, the getting-started guides built into the product, and a Champion two desks away.
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Pilot
Your staff use TakeoffQS on live jobs for a couple of weeks while the rest of your quoting carries on exactly as normal. That way a problem in the pilot never puts a real quote at risk. Starting on a defined slice also means everything after it goes faster, because the people who ran the pilot are there to support the ones behind them.
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Go live
In the order agreed at kickoff, whether that's team by team, branch by branch, or everyone at once. Users, permissions and price book get confirmed before each group goes live. If your quotes need to land in a system you already run, we set that handoff up so nobody retypes anything. If you're quoting straight out of TakeoffQS, that's the whole thing, and the quote your customer sees comes out of it looking the way you want it to.
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Hypercare
A month of close support after go-live. Our team is available to your Champions and managers directly, requests get handled immediately rather than queued, and reporting gets tuned once you can see real numbers coming through.
How long it takes
Ten to fourteen weeks from kickoff to the end of hypercare, for a single estimating business with one to three teams. Six to eight weeks of that sits before the pilot starts.
Shown at the fourteen-week end of the range. Kickoff is a single day; hypercare runs alongside go-live.
What drives each phase
- Kickoff
- On site, both teams in the room
- Capture
- How much of your pricing logic is already written down
- Configure
- The state of your price book, and your availability to make decisions
- Calibrate
- How many plans you give us, and how fast your hand-quoted comparisons come back
- Train
- Champion availability
- Pilot
- Named users on live work
- Go live
- How many teams or branches, and how far apart they are
- Hypercare
- From go-live
Capture and Configure are the phases that move. Where your price book is current and your pricing rules are already documented, it's quicker. Where they live in the heads of two or three senior estimators, allow the longer end and expect to give those people real time with us. That's the single biggest thing you control.
Templates and price books
Worth being blunt, because this is the heavy part and everyone underestimates it.
Your price book is the recurring cost, not the one-off
Supplier lists change monthly. Getting your products loaded and mapped correctly the first time is work, and keeping them current is work forever. TakeoffQS has an import wizard for this, it handles the spreadsheet you already keep, and it's designed so your own people can run it without us.
Your template is the one-off, and it's a real one
The formulas that turn a measured length into a quantity, and the quantity into the right product, are your estimating experience written down. Ours ship pre-built and you adjust them. Or we build yours from scratch with you, at the fixed implementation fee. Either way you own it when we're done.
Your commercial data stays yours
Prices, catalogues, margins and quote values are never used to train anything. The full position on data is in our Trust Centre.
What we need from you
Four things, and they're the difference between ten weeks and twenty.
Your estimators' time
Two hours a week with the people who genuinely know how you price. Not a delegate, and not someone reading it off a spreadsheet.
Real plans, in volume
Including the messy ones, quoted by hand so we've got something to compare against. There's no substitute for this input.
Someone who can settle a question in the room
Most of what slows a rollout down is waiting on an answer rather than waiting on code.
Honest feedback
We put the current state of the build in front of you every week, unfinished and warts and all. A customer who feels they have to be polite about our work is a customer we're going to disappoint.
Help and support
Three layers, so an estimator mid-quote gets an answer at the speed the question deserves.
A help centre covering every part of the product
Getting started, templates, price books, account setup and the traps worth knowing about before you hit them. It's written to stay current as the product moves rather than going stale six months after launch. We're doing the final pass on it now and it goes live shortly.
An AI assistant built into the app
Ask it a question the way you'd ask a colleague and it answers out of the help centre, so most "how do I" questions get sorted on the spot without anyone waiting on us. It's being built now and lands alongside the help centre.
Our team in New Zealand for everything else
Users can report a problem from inside the software itself, and it goes straight into our development queue instead of depending on someone remembering to send an email. Speed of the fix matters more to us than the absence of the bug, and hypercare is the month where you find out whether that's true.
Once you're live
We ship a release every week
You're not waiting months for an enhancement, and as an early customer you help shape what goes into them.
See what ships in the changelogA written report every fortnight, for as long as it's useful to you
It states what has slipped just as plainly as what's been delivered. That's the whole point of it.
How we work day to day
We work to what you need rather than to a fixed spec. Some customers want us in the room every week. Others want a template built, handed over, and then left to get on with it. Both are fine, and we'd rather agree which one you are at the start than assume.
Either way we iterate in the open. You see the state of the build as it comes together rather than waiting for one big reveal at the end, and what you tell us in a given week shapes what we do the next. Point us at a problem and we move on it.
What finished looks like
There's a test, and it's yours. Real plans, quoted by your team by hand and by the software, compared on accuracy and on time taken. We agreed to be judged on your test rather than a demonstration we control.
Passing it is the handover. The implementation closes out, the subscription begins, and the relationship changes shape from building something to running it.
From there your estimators are quoting faster, with fewer errors reaching site, on software built around the way your business already works rather than software you had to bend to fit.
What we won't move on is the test. We agree how you'll measure us before we start, and we get measured on it.
Questions
If you want the detail on security, data handling or how the AI works, that's in the Trust Centre.
Anything about implementation, timing or fees, email nick@takeoffqs.com and it comes straight to me.