Paving software: take-offs and quotes

Most paving contractors price jobs in the evening. A survey on paper, the area broken into rectangles, a calculator app, then a rewrite into Word or a spreadsheet. Fine for one driveway. At three jobs a week that eats half a day of unpaid work, and every so often a mistake that comes out of your pocket.

Software for paving contractors should solve exactly the gap between the shape of the area and the number on the quote. Everything else is window dressing.

Paper is fastest on site and worst back at the office. Copying it into a quote is doing the same job twice, and that's where most mistakes creep in.

A spreadsheet is good for prices and bad for geometry. An area with a cut-out for a tree or a curve at the driveway entrance can't be worked out in a spreadsheet other than by hand, and it won't tell you how many cuts a laying pattern will need.

Software earns its keep when quantities and a quote fall out of the shape you've drawn without any further copying. If it can't do that, it's just an expensive spreadsheet.

You draw the area in a 2D editor, cut-outs and curves included. You pick the paving blocks, the laying pattern and the sub-base thicknesses. From that the app works out the number of blocks with waste, pallets, tonnes of aggregate and sand, linear metres of kerb plus the off-cuts that can be used elsewhere. From the take-off it builds a price quote with sections, VAT and a QR code for payment. You send the customer a link, they open the document in a browser and can accept it.

If you've sketched the area on paper, photograph it with your phone and the app will try to trace the outline into the editor. It's a beta feature, so always check the result.

It's not that a paving contractor can't do the sums. It's that there are five rewrites between the survey and the finished quote, and each one is a chance to get it wrong. These are the mistakes that show up most often:

• The area broken into rectangles. A curve at the driveway entrance or a cut-out for a tree gets estimated. The estimate is always on the low side, because people round the edges in.
• Waste worked out from the area, not the pattern. Eight per cent is fine for a stretcher bond, not enough for herringbone. On 50 m² that difference is a whole pallet.
• Kerbs without off-cuts. A piece left over in one corner can be used in the next. Nobody tracks that by hand, so more gets ordered than needed.
• Pallets worked out by division. A three-size mix sells in a fixed format ratio. Need two more of the larger size and you're buying a whole pallet, including the other two sizes.
• The rewrite into the quote. The last step, where digits get transposed. The customer gets a figure you then either have to honour or explain.

Software doesn't remove these steps, it just works them all out from one source: the shape you drew. Change the sub-base thickness or the laying pattern and everything recalculates at once, quote included.

It isn't accounting software or a stock system. It doesn't produce structural drawings, engineering calculations or supplier orders. It doesn't replace a site visit: sub-base thickness and ground conditions are a judgement call made on site, and the app only turns that judgement into material and money.

Drawing runs on a desktop. On a phone it would be a slog, and we'd rather say that upfront than have you find out on site.

See the material calculator for a quick estimate, how to price a paving job and a sample price quote.