Why we built QTac
14 October 2026
Most take-off in this country is still done by scaling a printed drawing by hand, or by counting in a PDF viewer and typing into Excel. It works, in the sense that a number comes out at the end. What it does not do is leave a trail.
Three weeks after the bid goes in, the QS asks where 412 square metres of plaster came from. The honest answer is usually a sheet of paper that is no longer on the desk.
What we wanted
- Measure on screen, with snapping, so tracing a wall takes a second rather than a minute.
- Assign what is measured to a BOQ item, with the item's own parameters.
- Get an Excel dimension sheet that a quantity surveyor can check line by line.
- Work offline on a laptop, on site, with no login and no cloud.
- Cost less than a day of an estimator's time.
The big take-off packages do the first three well and fail the last two for a firm of our size. So we wrote QTac.
What we decided not to build
No AI. Nothing in QTac guesses what a shape means. It measures what you point at or what you map by layer. Automatic interpretation of a drawing sounds attractive right up to the moment it is wrong in a way that looks right, which is the single most expensive thing that can happen to an estimate.
No cloud. Drawings for a live tender are confidential. They stay on the computer that opened them, and nothing is uploaded, ever.
No bar bending schedule. Steel deserves a proper tool, not a corner of another one.
Who it is for
Estimators and billing engineers in contracting firms, freelance quantity surveyors, and consultancy staff checking a contractor's bill. If you have ever rebuilt a take-off because you could not reconstruct where a figure came from, this is for you.
Free for 14 days, then Rs 349 for 30 days, prepaid, no auto-debit. Download it and tell us what breaks: bqi.support@brainquisitive.com.