Steel fabrication · Electrical contracting
The drawing is the source of truth.
Planos reads the architect's PDF, measures every run against the sheet's own scale, assigns your products, prices the job, and drives it through drafting, production, QC and install sign-off. Steel and electrical, on one engine.
A human still reviews and signs off every job before it goes out.
A drawing, and the priced quote lines it became
A-201 · working drawing
Quote · measured off the sheet
| Mark | Length | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| BAL-1balustrade · 1050 mm | 7.20 m | $3,308 |
| BAL-2balustrade · 1050 mm | 4.80 m | $2,205 |
| HR-1handrail · 1000 mm · rake | 7.52 m | $1,615 |
| Total excl. GST | $7,128 |
- Measured length
- 19.52 m
- Runs off this sheet
- 3 of 4
Lengths are measured from the sheet's own scale — HR-1 on its rake, not its projection. Rates shown are illustrative.
01Enquiry · triage
It arrives as an email. It leaves as a job.
The RFQ mailbox gets read for you — site address pulled out, customer matched, the whole email archived, the job opened.
- 09:14 · 1 / 3
An email lands
"Balustrade quote — Lot 214 Example Rise, Sampleton" from estimating@examplehomes.com.au — 2 attachments: 52931-working-drawing-revC.pdf, 52931-site-plan.pdf
- 09:14:02 · 2 / 3
It gets read
Flagged as an RFQ, the site address pulled straight out of the text, the sender matched to Example Homes Pty Ltd, the original email archived as an .eml.
- 09:14:03 · 3 / 3
The job opens
Job 52931 · Example Homes Pty Ltd · Lot 214 Example Rise, Sampleton WA 6210 — both drawings already attached.
The same triage runs over public tenders, too — the tender inbox scores and files them the same way, ready in the queue.
02Read · drawing analysis
Every page read. Every figure grounded.
Vector geometry first, vision where the geometry cannot speak. The scale resolved, the runs traced on the drawing's own lines, every number still pointing at where it came from.
01 · Reading the linework
The sheet's own vector geometry, not a picture of it. Most of a drawing is things you are not quoting.
- BAL-17.20 m
balustrade · 1050 mm high
read from b-e · sheet A-201
- BAL-24.80 m
balustrade · 1050 mm high
read from b-s · sheet A-201
- HR-17.52 m
handrail · 1000 mm high · rake length, not the projection
read from s-1 · sheet A-201
- SCR-113.20 m
screen · 2408 mm high · 28c × 86 mm
read from w-w · sheet A-201
Hover a run to find it on the sheet. Every figure keeps the line it was measured from — that is what makes it checkable.
03Read · drawing chat
Ask the drawing anything.
A real agent with real tools. Ask it to find what you are quoting, then ask it for the lengths — and click through to the line it measured.
Locate the balustrades and handrails on this drawing.
Three runs on A-201. Two balustrades and one stair handrail — pick one to see it on the sheet.
What's the length of the balcony balustrade?
BAL-1 measures 7.20 m, taken off line B–E at the sheet's own scale. Nothing was retyped — that figure still points at the line it came from.
And the internal stairs — balustrade and handrail lengths?
BAL-2 is 4.80 m. HR-1 is 7.52 m — that is the RAKE length, not the horizontal projection. Quote a stair handrail on its projection and you quote it short.
04Mark · take-off
Mark it once. It already knows what it costs.
Pick a wall and it measures itself against the sheet's scale. Assign a product and the priced line writes itself.
Marked
Marked run
Balcony · north edge
11,995 mm
Measured from the linework at the sheet's scale.
Quote line
VISTA Slimview balustrade · 1050 mm
12.00 m × $459/m
$5,511
excluding GST
Rates shown are indicative. A real quote resolves your own rate sheet, options and markup.
Auto-marking finds the runs for you
Deterministic and $0, derived straight from the drawing's own vector linework — a human still confirms every marking before it reaches a quote.
A product assigned straight to the marking
The marking carries what it is, so the priced line follows from it — no separate lookup step.
Marking merge groups
Several marks that are really one continuous run merge together and price once, not once each.
05Price · quote builder
From marks to a quote your customer can sign.
Add straight from the take-off, then options, rate breakup, margin, approval, variation, signature, invoice.
$0
running subtotal, excluding GST — an indicative demo quote- 1 / 9
Add from the markings
Every priced marking becomes a quote line automatically — no retyping the take-off.
- 2 / 9
Assembly lines + options
Schema-driven assemblies expand into their line items, with options picked per line.
- 3 / 9
Live rate breakup
Materials, fixings, finishes, fabrication and install unfold beneath each line as it's edited.
- 4 / 9
Qualifications
Suggested qualifications are reviewed, accepted or dismissed before the quote goes out.
- 5 / 9
Margin heatmap
Every line is coloured by its own margin — this run sits at a 24% margin, visible before sign-off.
- 6 / 9
Approval routing
Below the org's margin threshold, the quote routes for approval before it can be sent.
- 7 / 9
Variation
A change after acceptance becomes a numbered variation against the original quote.
- 8 / 9
E-signature
The customer accepts and signs on a canvas — no token, no login required.
- 9 / 9
Invoice
Deposit, progress, balance or final — raised straight from the accepted quote.
- Subtotal, excl. GST
- $18,940
- GST (10%)
- $1,894
- Total, incl. GST
- $20,834
06Build · production
Then it runs the job.
Shop drawings, cutlists, stock allocation, shop-floor hours, staged QC, and an install signed off from a phone.
Drafting
Shop drawings and hardware orders release the job from the quote to the floor.
Cutlists
An AI-assisted cutlist comes off the shop drawing, ready to cut.
Stock allocation
Raw material is allocated from what's on hand before anything new is ordered.
Labour clock
Every worker clocks on to a workstation, so hours land against the job that earned them.
Multi-stage QC
Post-powdercoat is locked until pre-powdercoat is signed off — the gate only opens one way.
Install sign-off
An installer name, a signature, all four checklist items, and at least four photos — then the job flips to complete.
07The gap
Measuring a PDF is not quoting a job.
None of this is a knock on software that measures PDFs well — it is what that category was built for. It is just a long way short of quoting and building a metal or electrical job.
Where it stops
A takeoff tool measures. It does not know what it measured — a polyline on a PDF returns a length, not the fact that a stair handrail follows the rake rather than its projection.
What Planos does
Planos encodes 7 rules for how this trade is actually measured and priced, and checks every extraction against them. The engine knows a rake from a plan length before anyone looks at it.
Where it stops
Estimating software ends at the quote. Everything after it — cutlists, material orders, powdercoat colours, QC, install sign-off — is a different product, or a spreadsheet, and the job gets retyped at every boundary.
What Planos does
The quote, the cutlist, the purchase order, the QC checklist and the install sign-off are one record of one job. Nothing is retyped between the number you quoted and the job you built.
Where it stops
AI added to a markup tool is still a markup tool. Prompt-driven help on top of a PDF viewer leaves the takeoff with you; you are just asking questions while you do it.
What Planos does
The drawing goes in and measured, priced lines come out, each one still pointing at the line on the sheet it came from. A human confirms the result instead of producing it.
Where it stops
Markup, estimating, production and quality are typically four systems and four per-seat subscriptions, none of which can tell you what a job actually cost against what you quoted.
What Planos does
One system, so the estimate and the shop-floor hours land in the same place and the variance is a report rather than an investigation.
08One engine / second trade
The same engine reads a switchboard.
Read, mark, price, build — one spine, two trades, and the steel behaviour untouched when electrical shipped.
One spine, both trades
Read, mark, price, build — the same engine underneath a switchboard job as underneath a balustrade.
A trade is a pack, not a rewrite
Steel fabrication and electrical contracting each read their own vocabulary, rules and rates from the same pack system — so the next trade is configuration, not a second product.
Steel didn't move when electrical shipped
The steel pack's prompts and defaults are verified byte-identical to the code before electrical existed — checked, not promised.
09Electrical · cabling and switchboards
It sizes the cable while you draw the run.
Design current, derated capacity, volt drop, earth size — and the check that decided the answer.
Sized by the real engine, not a rule of thumb
Design current, derated capacity and voltage drop run through the production cable-sizing chain live, as you move the slider below.
Voltage drop capped at 5%
max voltage drop, the AS/NZS 3000 check that decides whether a run needs a bigger conductor.
Data runs gated at 90 m
permanent-link limit — the distance a run has to clear before it needs fibre or a mid-run switch.
Indicative only. The AS/NZS 3008 ampacity and volt-drop tables behind this sizer are logic-anchors we built to exercise the engine, not the licensed Standards Australia values — this demo is not certified electrical design.
Circuit
Design current, breaker size and every check below come straight from the production sizing engine for this load and run.
Result
- Conductor size
- 4 mm²
- Derated CCC
- 32 A (×1)
- Voltage drop
- 6.89 V (2.99%, limit 5%)
- Earth conductor
- 2.5 mm²
- Why this size
- Sized by current-carrying capacity — the conductor had to grow to safely carry the load's current.
- Standard reference
- AS/NZS 3008.1.1:2017 Table 9, Column 4, It=32 A → Iz=32 A; VD per Table 42 ×1.000; AS/NZS 3000:2018 cl 3.4.1 & cl 3.6.2.
Data run — the 90 m channel gate
Within the 90 m permanent-link limit.
Every AS/NZS 3000, AS/NZS 3008.1.1 and AS/CA S009:2020 table behind this page is an indicative logic-anchor we built to exercise the engines, not a substitute for a licensed copy of the Standards.
Switchboards, smart wiring and compliance →10Electrical · lighting design
It lights the room to a number.
Set the target lux and it places the fittings, then shows you the room in three dimensions.
Indicative only. The room-index and utilisation-factor chain here runs the real production lumen-method engine, but its utilisation-factor and maintenance-factor tables are coarse planning approximations — not manufacturer photometric data or a licensed CIBSE/AS table. This is not certified lighting design. Wall bounce in the 3D view redistributes where light pools; it never moves the achieved-lux figure.
Room
Result
- Luminaires
- 13
- Achieved
- 341 lx
- Connected load
- 117 W
- Room index / UF
- 1.04 / 0.55
Meets the target for an AS/NZS 1680 lumen-method check — indicative, see the disclaimer above.
A target lux, sized and placed
Room index, utilisation factor, luminaire count, achieved lux — the real lumen-method chain, with fittings auto-placed on the plan, not eyeballed.
The room in three dimensions
Orbit it, drag a fitting, and watch the beams and contours redraw — lumens and watts drawn from the same specs a real AU downlight, batten or highbay carries.
Glare, maintenance factor, and the verdict
Every figure already accounts for the light lamps lose over their life, checked against an AS/NZS 1680 target — indicative, never certified design.
11Learn · the flywheel
Every mark you make teaches it.
Confirmations and corrections become training labels, so the next drawing needs less of you than the last one did.
- 01
You mark up
An estimator marks the runs on a drawing, the way they always have — because the marks are the job, not a chore added for the model.
- 02
Marks become labels
Every confirmation and every correction is captured as a training label, tied to the exact geometry it came from.
- 03
The studio catches the hard ones
Where the model was unsure, a human confirms or corrects the element type — nothing is written without an explicit confirm.
- 04
Models retrain
The ranker learns which candidates estimators actually keep, and the detector retrains on the located boxes.
- 05
It proposes more, and better
Auto-marking puts up more candidates, and the ones it puts up are ones you are more likely to accept.
- 06
You correct less
Fewer edits per drawing, and the ones left are the genuinely ambiguous ones — and each of those corrections is the next training label, which is where this started.
And we check whether it worked
“It learns” is only worth anything next to “and we measure whether it got better”. Both live in the app, not in a notebook.
Prompt shadow tests
A candidate prompt runs alongside the live one on real jobs before it is allowed to replace it.
Take-off accuracy
Measured against confirmed ground truth, per job, so a regression is visible rather than anecdotal.
Pipeline failures
Every failed run is kept and inspectable, because the runs that break are the ones worth reading.
Learning & accuracy
One place to see what the corrections have actually changed.
12The numbers
Estimating is the bottleneck. Move it and the whole shop moves.
Fabricators and contractors lose bids they could have won because the estimator could not get to the drawing in time. Put your own numbers in — the arithmetic below is yours, not ours.
Return model · your inputs, plain arithmetic
46 WORKING WEEKS
Your assumption to set. Drag it to whatever you would actually sign up to and the rest follows. It stops short of 100% because a person still reviews every job.
The second-order effect is the one that matters: quoting capacity, not headcount. Every RFQ you answer first is one your competitor answers second.
Horizon 1 · in production
Aluminium & steel fabrication
Balustrade, handrail, screens, gates and stairs — with the seven domain rules that only matter to someone who has actually quoted this work.
Horizon 2 · shipped
Electrical contracting
Cabling, switchboards, lighting, smart wiring and compliance — the proof that the spine generalises across trades without a rewrite.
Horizon 3 · next
Any trade that quotes off a drawing
Glazing, HVAC, plumbing, joinery, concrete. The same read-mark-price-build loop, a new catalogue and a new rule pack.
Market sizing is supplied separately in the investor pack. This page carries only figures traceable to the platform itself, plus the arithmetic above on your own inputs.
13The rest of it
And everything else a shop actually runs on.
One platform, end to end. Every module below ships today — this list is generated from the product's own registry, so it cannot drift ahead of what you get.
Running the work
8The enquiry, the customer, the tender, the job — all in one place.
CustomersJobsRFQ triageBulk triageTriage exceptionsTendersReports & analyticsPush notifications
Drawings & AI
10Read, marked, measured and asked questions of.
Drawing analysisAuto-markingManual snippingRevision diffAssembly linesRate breakupQualificationsTake-off exportsLabelling StudioSymbol extractionE (Electrical only)
Catalogue & pricing
6Your own products and your own rates, priced consistently.
Products & catalogueCatalogue authoringCustom ratesTemplatesTemplate cloningInventory & MRP
Making it
7From shop drawing to cutlist to what the floor actually spent.
DraftingProductionAI cutlistWorkstation boardLabour trackingQCMulti-stage QC
Getting paid
7Quote, variation, invoice, payment — nothing retyped between them.
Quotes & BOMBOM detail PDFMargin heatmapVariationsE-signatureInvoicingAuto PO email
Out on site
4Site measures, QC and install sign-off, done from a phone.
Site measureOffline measure PWAInstall sign-offInstall sign-off v2
Electrical
6Cabling, switchboards, lighting and smart wiring. Electrical trade only.
Cabling & circuitsSwitchboardLighting design3D lighting designerSmart wiringElectrical compliance
Platform
4The unglamorous parts that decide whether you can trust it.
Builder portalPortal accessAudit trailOnboarding
E electrical only. Everything unmarked is available to every trade.
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