Quantities before quotes
Before a landscaping contractor can quote a job, someone has to measure the plan: square metres of turf and softfall, linear metres of edging, counts of trees and play equipment. On a big plan that's careful, slow work, and it's usually done by hand.
I've been doing takeoff work for a landscaping and playscape contractor that works on childcare centres, and I wanted to know how much of it AI could take off their plate.
I tried to automate all of it first
My first attempt was fully automatic. On the first plan, a huge A0 sheet, it worked well. The shade sails were drawn in a way that let me pick out every panel exactly, and I could find the trees by their colour and outline. Where an area had a clean boundary, my numbers came close to the client's own bill of quantities.
The next two plans hit a wall. Their surfaces were drawn as hatching inside boundaries, with no colour fill, and nothing in the file separated the edge of an area from the hatch lines inside it. Automatic measuring broke into fragments.
That's why quantity surveyors still trace plans by hand. Some of the information simply isn't in the file.
So I changed the question
Instead of asking how to automate the tracing, I asked how to make tracing fast, and use AI only where it's reliable. The answer became Plan-Markup, a tool that runs in your web browser.
AI does two jobs it's genuinely good at:
- Reading the legend. You draw a box around the plan's legend, and Claude reads every item and sorts it into an area (m²), a length (LM) or a count. That choice picks the right drawing tool for each material. If the legend is split across the sheet, box more than one part and the results add up.
- Reading the scale. Claude reads the drawing scale and sheet size from the title block. If it can't, you can pick the paper size and ratio, or measure a length you already know.
The person does the part that needs judgement: the tracing. Draw a shape for turf, a line for edging, a click for each tree. Cut a hole for the sandpit inside the turf and the area drops to the net figure. Quantities update as you draw.
Every number traces back to a shape
What comes out is a bill of quantities by sheet, by item and by individual shape, with subtotals. You can print an A4 report with a numbered reference plate for each material, so whoever checks it can see which shape produced which number. Or export the whole breakdown as a spreadsheet file.
One detail I'm particularly glad I caught: the scale maths uses the page's true dimensions, not the standard paper size printed on it. On pages that weren't quite standard size, assuming the standard size caused up to about 12% error in areas. On a big landscaping job, 12% is a lot of turf.
Where it's at
Plan-Markup is my own product. It's in development and sits behind a login. When I demonstrate it, I use a plan I drew myself with made-up data, not a client's drawing. I'm not claiming time saved per plan yet, because I'd rather measure that properly than guess. And I still recommend a person checks the numbers against the reference plates before they go into a quote.
Let AI do the parts it's reliable at, and leave the judgement to the person who signs the quote.
The full story is in the Plan-Markup case study. It isn't only for landscaping: edging, fencing, pipes, tiles and fixtures are all an area, a length or a count. If you price work from plans, tell me about your trade, or read more about AI assistants and automation.