Measure the curb once. Assemblies price the rest.

The takeoff is the part people picture. You click your way along the curb line, around the paving limits, down the storm run, and by the end of the afternoon you have quantities you trust.

Then comes the part nobody puts in a brochure. You export those quantities, open the spreadsheet, and start typing them back in. 340 linear feet of curb and gutter becomes a row. Under it go the concrete, the forms, the crew hours, the machine. You dig up last year's unit prices, paste them across, and hope you did not drop a digit somewhere between the two windows. Then the GC issues an addendum that shifts the pad, and you do a version of the whole thing again.

That hand-off is where estimating hours go, and it is where transcription errors get in.

What assemblies do

An assembly attaches a priced recipe to a construction class, so a class stops being a color on a plan and becomes something that reports what it costs you.

You build it once, on the class: the material lines, the labor lines, the equipment, the subcontract. Each line points at a resource in your library, which is where its price lives. After that, drawing is the only thing you do. Measure 340 LF of that class and the worksheet reports 340 LF and the material, the crew hours and the equipment days that go with it, each at your rate.

In the takeoff, it is three steps

Open the Library tab in the takeoff sidebar and you are looking at your company catalog: folders, classes, and the items each one carries. Pick a class, hit Draw, and start measuring.

If the class needs something it cannot read off the plan, a section depth, a trench width, it asks you right after the shape commits, with the measured quantity shown and a live preview of what that run generates. You can set it once and let it ride for the rest of the session.

Open the Worksheet and flip it from Quantities to Items. Every drawn class is there with its priced lines under it, and every run is there individually. Change the depth on run 4 without touching runs 1 through 3. Type a value once and push it to every run at the same time. Click a unit cost and set the price for this job. The number tells you where it came from, whether that is a rate table, the library default, or you.

One number that shows why this is worth building

Take the Aggregate base preset that ships in the library, described on its own row as the compacted rock section under paving. It is an Area class measured in SY. It asks for a depth, 6 in by default. It carries a material line, Class 2 aggregate base priced in tons, on the formula (area * 0.5) / 27 * 1.4 with 5% waste, and a labor line, Grading crew, at 0.012 hours per SY.

Draw the paving limits at 9,000 SF and that one shape reports 233 tons of base before waste, 245 after, and 12 hours of grading crew, each at your rate. You did not type a row, and you did not open a second window.

The order those numbers come out in matters, and it is the same everywhere. Formulas run per run and then add up. They are not added up first and worked out once. Waste applies to materials after the sum. Round up is last, so anything you buy whole comes out a whole number of whole things. The per-run rule is the one that pays: on a class rounded up to the load, three separate runs never quietly share a partial load the way one summed total does. An item that cannot be worked out shows a dash with the reason in its tooltip. It never reports a confident zero.

What ships alongside

Presets. You do not start from an empty catalog. The preset library holds 237 ready-made classes with assemblies across 29 trades. They carry quantities and formulas only, so they price from your rates, not from somebody's national average, and everything is editable the moment it lands in your catalog.

Resource Library. Your master list of labor, equipment, materials and subcontractors, with the rate each one prices at. A blank rate stays blank downstream and shows a dash, rather than a confident wrong number.

Price-book import. Most estimating and accounting packages export a price book as CSV or Excel. Drop the file in, map the columns, review what will be added against what will just get a new rate. It adds and updates. It never deletes.

Rate tables. Build a set of prices for a region, a wage type or a year, then pin it to a bid. Pin last year's numbers to last year's job. Pin the prevailing wage table to the public work. Changing the pin re-prices the worksheet, and the prices you set by hand stay exactly where you put them. The price you set always wins.

One more thing worth knowing: when you edit an assembly from inside a project, you can fork a copy for that job alone. The company version stays as it is, and one button puts you back on it.

Plans

Construction Classes and assemblies are on the paid plans. Rate Tables and the Resource Library need Pro or higher. The AI rate lookup and the AI cleanup on a price-book import are part of Pro+ Intelligence.

Where to find it

In the dashboard, go to Resources then Construction Classes to build or import your catalog. Inside a takeoff, it is the Library tab in the right sidebar, and the Items view in the worksheet.

There are two new training manuals, one on assemblies and one on rate tables and resource management, downloadable right where you use them: the assemblies guide on the Construction Classes page, the rates guide on the Rate Tables and Resource Library pages. Five new help articles cover the same ground in shorter pieces: building an assembly, using assemblies in a takeoff, editing an assembly mid takeoff, which rate table a bid uses, and the Resource Library with price-book imports.

Build the recipe once. Then just draw.