Send us the bid set by 6 pm Pacific. By 8 am Eastern the next morning, get back the quantities with the engineering already done — pressure class, stem heights, actuation — a valve register, a quote built in your own template with the price column left to you, a marked-up drawing set, and the list of places your scope and the contract documents disagree — reviewed and signed off by a licensed Georgia PE. Valves counted, quotes checked, job done. Bob's your uncle.
A full bid set with addenda is two to four days of an estimator’s time done properly, and it is never done properly at bid speed. Bob does it overnight and hands back the paperwork; your estimator keeps the judgement and gets the days.
Sets received by 6 pm Pacific (9 pm Eastern) are in your inbox by 8 am Eastern the next business morning. Addenda revisions the same day. Rush lane: same business day, front of the line, for a priority fee.
Reading every sheet, hunting every schedule tag, rebuilding the quote in your template, chasing the OEM for a scope letter — that is the administrative half of a take-off, and it is the half Bob takes.
The set you would have passed on because the clock was too short is now a set you can quote. Volume goes up without a hire, and the estimator you have spends the week on the calls that win work.
Anyone can put a chat model on a PDF and get a number back. The number is not the hard part. A take-off you can quote from needs the pressure class for every valve where the set states none — derived from the hydraulic profile and checked against the process piping schedule; the stem extension and floorstand height for every buried and below-grade valve, from the elevations on the drawings; the operator — chainwheel, handwheel, electric, modulating — read per instance, not propagated from a typical; and the supply boundary, which decides whether the valve is yours to price at all.
Bob is run by a Georgia professional engineering firm born in municipal water and wastewater. Every derived value is marked for verification rather than presented as fact, every line carries its own confidence, and a licensed PE reviews the issue and signs his name to it. A general-purpose model gives you a count in a few hours — and it is still wrong, because none of the above was ever in it.
Derived where the set is silent; cross-checked against the piping schedule’s test pressure — the number the vendor actually needs.
Extension length and operator height from the drawn elevations, so the nine-foot stem is on the quote and not a surprise.
Reviewed and issued by a licensed engineer. Evidence at machine scale; accountability from a person.
Every rep already has a way to do this. The question is what it costs in estimator hours, and what it misses.
| What you get | Estimator at bid speed | General-purpose AI | Bob’s Your Uncle |
|---|---|---|---|
| Every sheet and every addendum read, not sampled | ~ | ~ | ✓ |
| Pressure class, stem heights and actuation engineered from the set, not guessed | ~ | ✕ | ✓ |
| Every counted valve evidenced to the sheet | ✕ | ✕ | ✓ |
| Supply-boundary conflicts flagged (who furnishes what) | ~ | ✕ | ✓ |
| Quote rebuilt in your own template, your product lines | ✓ | ✕ | ✓ |
| Trained on water & wastewater bid documents only | ✓ | ✕ | ✓ |
| A licensed PE reviews and signs the issue | ✕ | ✕ | ✓ |
| Your pricing never leaves your shop | ✓ | ✕ | ✓ |
| Turnaround on a full bid set | Days, when there’s time | Hours — and still wrong | Next morning by 8 am Rush: same day |
Every instance on the set: size, type, service, actuation, derived pressure, sheet reference, locating description, confidence flag.
Rebuilt in your own template and product lines, priced-ready, with every difference from your own count highlighted.
Every counted valve circled and labelled with its register ID, colour-coded by scope.
A cropped snip of the drawing behind every valve, keyed to its register ID. Nothing asks you to take our word for it.
The commercial output: conflicts, gaps and the RFIs worth raising, in plain language, cited to sheet and paragraph.
Bob is not a general-purpose AI pointed at a drawing. He runs on a proprietary training cycle built by a Georgia professional engineering firm that was born in municipal water and wastewater — and it is fed continuously with publicly available bid documents: plan sets, valve and gate schedules, specifications and addenda from real municipal projects. Every set he reads makes the next one sharper, and every set is read the way an estimator reads it: schedule against plan, plan against spec, spec against who is actually furnishing the valve.
The method is ours and stays ours — a patent application is in preparation. The results are yours: quantities you can check line by line, evidenced to the sheet, reviewed by a licensed engineer who signs his name to the issue.
A take-off always raises a handful of things only your estimator knows — which style you quote when the schedule is silent, which packaged-equipment partners you carry, which owners in your territory always want a chainwheel. We ask them in a short email with every deliverable. Your answers become part of a model tuned to your firm, so the next set starts where the last one left off.
Register, quote in your template, markup, evidence, findings — by 8 am.
A short Q&A email: the three to six things only you can settle, and a line for one question back to our engineer.
Your answers fold into a model kept for your firm alone — never shared, never pooled.
Fewer questions on the next set, fewer lines to re-check, and less of your estimator’s week spent on admin.
Two reps quoting the same plant carry different product lines, different partners and different habits. A count that ignores that is only half done — the other half is your estimator re-cutting it to how you actually bid. Bob learns that half from you, once, and keeps it.
The time that comes back is the administrative time: hunting the schedule for a style, chasing the OEM for a scope letter, rebuilding a quote in your own template. Your estimator keeps the judgement; Bob keeps the paperwork.
On a recent 184-sheet bid set with five addenda, the contract documents disagreed with each other and with the rep’s own quote in three commercially significant ways — and every disagreement was money. After five addenda the valve schedule itself had never been reissued; it still contradicted three of them. Bob reads all of it against all of it, at bid speed, and reports what does not line up.
Named as supplier-provided by the specification and flagged in the plan schedule — but absent from the equipment supplier’s proposal. Three documents put it on the supplier; the supplier’s own scope did not have it.
An addendum moved it to the packaged-system supplier; the rep’s as-bid quote still carried it — a modulating electric valve on a floorstand with a nine-foot extension stem. Not a cheap line to carry for nothing.
Added in five lines at the back of an addendum’s revision list. No tag, in no schedule. No amount of reading the drawings surfaces it — only the line-by-line comparison against the as-bid scope did.
An estimator gets a bid set, a bid clock, and a valve schedule running to a couple of hundred tags. Counting is the part everyone worries about — but the count is rarely where the money goes. It goes into the supply boundary: the plan valve schedule, the equipment specification, the OEM's scope of supply and your own as-bid quote almost never agree.
Where they disagree, a valve gets priced twice, or by nobody, and nobody finds out until the job is running. Reading all four against each other at bid speed is not work an estimator has time to do. It is exactly the work a well-supervised agent is good at.
Bob delivers quantities — what is on the set, where, what size and type, how it is actuated, and who furnishes it. The quote comes back in your own template with the price column empty. Your costs, margins, discounts and product lines stay with you; they never enter our system, and we never ask for them.
The one thing we do want is your as-bid quote after the fact, because the line-by-line comparison between your scope and the contract documents is where the findings come from — and even then we read the tags, not the dollars.
If your firm would rather run its own model — on your data, inside your walls, trained for your product lines — we can apply our proprietary training cycle to build it for you. The corpus of public bid documents, the water and wastewater reading rules, and the engineer-review loop come with it. Your quantities, your quotes and your pricing stay entirely yours.
Standard: send the set by 6 pm Pacific and the take-off is in your inbox by 8 am Eastern the next business morning. Rush: same business day, front of the line, for a priority fee. Addenda revisions the same day either way. Unusually large sets get a time quoted on receipt.
Two steps. Your details first, then a secure upload straight into our project system — no email attachments, no size limits that matter. We’ll confirm receipt, set up the project folder, and come back with an engagement letter before any work starts.
Thanks — we have your project details. You’ll get an invoice and engagement letter from us through Chase within one business day; work starts when the letter is signed. Use the button below to upload the drawing set, every addendum, the valve and packaged-equipment specification sections, and your quotation template. Files go straight into a private folder in our project system that only we can see. Please name the files with your company and the project.
Upload your files →Large sets are fine. Zip is fine. If your browser blocks the upload window, allow pop-ups for this site or use the link we email you.