Every line the takeoff can emit has a row with a cost, a sell price and a unit — posts, girts, purlins, steel panels, trim, trusses, hardware, openings, insulation, concrete. The book ships calibrated and the builder overrides what they like; only edited rows are stored, so re-running the calibration can still improve an account's untouched numbers.
Also called: lumber prices · yard pricing · cost and sell · material rates · 2x6 went up · material prices · price book · cost and sell price · update my prices
Your yard's prices drive every quote, and one edit reprices all of them
Cost and sell price per material, edited in one place when the yard changes its pricing. Lumber going up 20% is an afternoon of edits rather than a quarter of quotes written at last year's numbers. The starting book was calibrated against 258 real estimates, so day-one numbers are close before you touch anything.
Change the material, not the ten line types made out of it
A takeoff says girts, cripples and sills; a yard sells 2x6 SPF by the foot. Each line is bound to the material it's actually made of, so one edit to that material moves every girt, cripple and sill on every estimate. A separate price per line type drifts, and the drift shows up as margin you can't explain.
Cost and sell sit on the same row, so margin is visible per material
What you pay and what you charge are side by side, with zero-priced items, margin under 20% and margin over 40% flagged as you scroll. A book holding sell prices only tells you your revenue and nothing about whether the steel is carrying the job or dragging it.
A wrong unit fails a check instead of shipping a wrong quote
When the book prices per foot and the takeoff counts objects, forgetting the conversion doesn't error — it bills a 27-foot roof panel as one foot, and a 4,000 square foot roof comes to $225. The conversion is done for you, and a check runs across every option a building can carry rather than a few sample designs. Insulation, a cupola and a ridge vent all priced at zero once, because no sample had them switched on.
A low total names its own cause
The takeoff reports how many lines priced, how many didn't, and exactly which ones. A material with no price contributes nothing and says nothing, which is how 14 of 34 line types on a 30×40 — the wall and roof steel among them — once priced at zero with no warning at all.
- 1Defaults ship in code; a tenant's overrides live in one JSON column on their organization.
- 2Takeoff lines match the book on their usage key, and an absent key stays unpriced rather than silently costing nothing.
- 3Prices flow straight into the customer total, the estimate list, the pipeline card and the portal, through the one shared derivation.
- 4Changing a bound material in Settings — '2x6 SPF' — changes every girt, cripple and sill on every estimate at once, which is what a builder means when they say lumber went up.
A price book that ships with invented numbers is worse than no price book, because a builder trusts it once and then eats the difference. The defaults were calibrated against 258 real estimates from working builders: cost and price for each audited row are the blended median of every priced line, converted into the unit the takeoff actually emits. Your account stores only the rows you have changed — carrying 252 materials times two numbers for a builder who edited four of them is a lot of dead weight, and storing the untouched ones would freeze today's defaults into the account so a better audit could never improve them.
- Estimating software shipping prices with no relationship to a real yard
- Updating one material meaning updating every quote by hand
See it on your own jobs
Twenty minutes, your numbers, no slide deck. We’ll build one of your real buildings in front of you and send you the estimate link at the end — yours to keep either way.
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