Drawing Take-offs: From Drawings to BOQ Quantities Automatically
Extracting quantities from drawings is one of the most labour-intensive parts of tendering. A set of architectural or engineering drawings can take days to work through manually. Drawing take-offs automate the bulk of this work.
From Drawings to Quantities, Automatically
Upload your drawings and the platform reads them, identifies elements, and extracts quantities directly into your bill of quantities.
Supported File Formats
Drawing take-offs support a wide range of file formats:
- PDF drawings — scanned or vector
- Images — JPEG, PNG, TIFF
- CAD formats — DWG and DXF
- BIM models — IFC
Whether you're working from a scanned paper drawing or a fully structured BIM model, the platform can process it.
What Gets Extracted
The extraction process identifies and measures the elements that matter for pricing:
- Structural elements and wall lengths
- Room dimensions and floor areas
- Surface areas for finishes
- Linear lengths for services and runs
- Item counts — doors, windows, fixtures
The output is structured into standard BOQ line items ready for pricing.
Review and Adjust
Take-off results are presented for your review before anything is added to your BOQ. You can see exactly what was detected on the drawing, check the measurements, and adjust any items that need correction.
The process is designed to give you a strong first draft that you refine — not a black-box output you have to trust blindly.
Complex Drawings With the Interact Skill
For drawings that require more contextual understanding — for example, a site layout used to estimate access road requirements — the Drawing Take-off skill in AI Interact can work through it with you.
It explains what it's seeing, notes the assumptions it's making, and lets you adjust the interpretation before quantities are finalised.
Significant Time Savings on Complex Tenders
For tenders with large drawing sets, the time savings are substantial. What previously required a dedicated quantity surveyor working for days can now be done in hours.
The accuracy of automated take-offs is reliable enough to serve as a strong starting point for most standard construction drawing types — with a human review layer to catch edge cases.