Fast, accurate take-off and estimating software

⠀⠀Create winning bids in less than half the time
⠀⠀Excellent 1:1 training and support
⠀⠀Designed to make estimating easy for contractors

Estimating Software South Africa

Digital take off software for contractors

It’s quite simple: our software enables you to complete your takeoff and price any job with ease. How RapidBid is priced is nice and simple too, as there are three options available to you, these are: Contractor, Professional and Expert.

All three options include all the required tools to takeoff digitally, but our more advanced pricing plans include the more powerful tools that enable you to save even more time. Find out more about what is included at each pricing level here.










Unlock advanced take-off tools to speed up projects.

Full estimating functionality with a custom database.

Our most powerful software including live price updates.

South Africa's best takeoff and estimating software

Fast, efficient quoting software for contractors and quantity surveyors

No matter what trade you’re in, a huge amount of your time probably goes into producing estimates whenever you consider taking on a new project. That’s understandable, since there’s a lot at stake and mistakes can be very dangerous when it comes to your profit margins.

However, we’ve found that the vast majority of contractors have serious concerns about using manual, outdated methods to calculate quotes for jobs, as opposed to generating their estimates with software. After all, most people don’t enjoy wasting hours of time they could spend actually getting the work done, or even taking a break once in a while.

Under that kind of time pressure, counting and calculating quantities by hand can easily lead to mistakes, risking all your hard work being wasted if the estimate turns out to be inaccurate. On top of that, additional costs like printing drawings cut directly into your profits, if you even win the project.

RapidBid is the simple solution that gives you back control over your time and your workload. It’s much more than just measurement software – for quantity surveyors and contractors, RapidBid is a powerful, all-in-one solution packed with features designed to save you time while producing more professional and accurate quotes than ever before.

Producing estimates without software (the old-fashioned way)

As you probably know from experience, the manual process of completing a takeoff and estimating a new project from scratch can be very time consuming and frustrating. It’s commonly cited as a contractor’s least favourite aspect of their work.

First you need to get all your documents in order and find the drawings you’ll need to refer to. If you’ve been sent digital copies, it can take a while just to check each file and establish which ones are relevant.

Once you’ve done that, all the drawings need to be printed. If you have the facilities in-house, this can still be costly and take a while to do. Most people don’t have big enough printers in the office, so it’s usually necessary to send the files to a print shop, wait for them to be done and arrange to physically collect them later. This can easily take hours, if not days, and in the meantime your competitors might already be racing ahead of you.

Once you have the drawings, it’s time to clear a large free space on your desk. Collecting all your rulers, pens and other stationery is often a task in itself, and then you’ll have to try and allocate several hours of your time to the task of manually searching the drawings for everything that’s relevant to your trade. It’s also easy to get distracted, especially in a busy office, which slows everything down and increases the likelihood of making mistakes or missing something.

Manual estimating also involves a lot of duplication of work. You’ll be counting everything up, writing it all down, checking all the totals again by hand, and then transferring those figures to your estimate. The chances of making errors are multiplied every time you have to transfer numbers from one sheet to another, so even if you started off with the correct figures, the end result might be inaccurate.

The best-case scenario is that you actually win the project, and your estimate was accurate enough that you’re able to make money, but you still spent many more hours than necessary producing the quote in the first place. In many other cases, you won’t be so lucky and that hard graft in the office will all be for nothing, either because you made too many errors, or more likely your competitors got the advantage by using a faster system and they beat you to it.

RapidBid offers a third scenario, and we think it’s a clear winner – a lot less effort, and a better chance of success. But how does that work in practice?

How RapidBid PDF takeoff and estimating software works

Compared to the manual process, getting a quote using RapidBid is a breeze. The first step is to open the drawings you’ll need for the PDF takeoff, and we’ve already made things easier for you. RapidBid lets you instantly preview each file, so you can select the ones you actually need much more quickly, without having to load up each one separately.

Once you have your drawings on screen, you’re already several steps ahead of your competitors who still do things by hand (they’re probably waiting for their printouts to be ready, and that’s if they’re quick). Next, simply set the right scale for the file and you’re ready to go.

There’s no need to look for your highlighters now – everything you need to get started is right there in the program. Use the on-screen tools to easily accomplish all of the following and more:

  • Measure distances, walls, pipes or anything else with just a click
  • Automatially count all instances of a particular item, such as a socket or a switch
  • Calculate areas instantly, ideal for roofing, painting and many more uses
  • Highlight or hide elements for a clearer overall view

One of the best features of RapidBid is that it’s an all-in-one solution, so there’s no more pointless duplication of effort. All the figures from your takeoff will automatically be pulled through into your estimate. That means all the calculations will be instantly done for you, from quantities to prices. All the time you’d usually be forced to spend doing these by hand or in a spreadsheet is immediately back under your control.

Once you’ve included all the necessary numbers, your estimate will be ready to go. Then you can easily generate a professional-looking quote to send to your client, which is all done at the touch of a button once your template is set up. When you add up all the time saved, the difference is likely to be around 80% on average – a significant benefit in any business.

What do the estimating experts think?

RapidBid has already helped estimators all around the world, since the problem of efficiently producing accurate estimates is shared by just about every contractor in every trade. To get some independently-sourced evidence of how well it really works, we asked researchers at a leading US-based university to investigate.

The researchers surveyed a large group of specialists in the construction industry and other fields, who typically used pens and paper to do their takeoffs and calculate quotes. 94% of the focus group said at the beginning of the study that they thought estimating reduced their productivity, which puts the problem into perspective. It’s a major concern for almost everyone in the industry, but not many are taking proactive action to solve it.

Over the course of the study, the focus group were given RapidBid software so they could try using it for their real projects. Originally, the group reporting spending an average of five hours on every single quote. After using the software instead, this dropped a staggering 80% to just one hour on average.

It’s hard to argue that cutting down a five-hour task by four hours isn’t a significant saving. You can also see quite clearly how that tends to have a positive impact on profits very quickly. Once your time is freed up, how you use it is your choice. You could generate five times as many estimates in the same time (without worrying about whether you rushed too much and messed up the calculations), increasing your chances of beating your competition to win more projects.

Alternatively, if you’re more concerned about completing projects you’ve already won, you can put a lot more time into working on those. Either way, that’s still four hours of painstaking concentration and calculations that you’ve saved yourself.

Try our quoting and quantity surveying software

The chances are your business could easily save thousands, if not millions each year by switching to RapidBid. The software pays for itself very quickly, given the average time saving per project, so value for money really isn’t an issue.

However, we don’t expect you to take our word for it that easily. With that in mind, we’re offering free online demo of RapidBid so you can try it on real quotes and see for yourself what a difference the software makes.

We’ll provide detailed, one-to-one training to make sure you get the most out of the program if you sign up for the full version, but we hope you’ll be able to pick up the basics just by opening the software and giving it a try yourself.

Click the button to request your software demo, and give it a try next time you’re ready to produce an estimate for a potential new job. You’ll be glad you did.