Countfire

Central storage of all takeoff documents. No more boxes of rolled-up plans cluttering my office. I would typically fill 1-2 boxes every month, so it really has reduced clutter and the overall appearance of my office. It definitely saves money when you consider that you no longer have to plot jobs that you don't win. That is a lot of paper, toner, and wear on your plotter.

The software is very easy to use and you can be fully trained on all of the keyboard shortcuts and navigation in less than a week. After about 5 jobs, you will very confident that you aren't missing any devices during takeoff and will have your own workflow for getting a takeoff done.

The developers are constantly making improvements, adding features, bug fixes, and you get pretty routine feedback when one of your feature requests are considered or implemented.

Customer and Tech support is top-notch and very responsive, and everyone seems to be very well trained on the product. It is also a very small team, so you will typically be speaking (texting) with someone you're familiar with.

The software is 100% cloud-based, and from my early conversations with the sales team, is the heart of their mission and will never change. That alone is not a negative, however, I feel that some of the processing could (and should) be done on your local machine and then pushed to the cloud to create the "output package". Moving between pages of a PDF is not as fast as scrolling in your preferred PDF reader. It's not slow, but there is definitely a pause before you're ready to work on the next sheet. It seems they could have better control of the user interface if there was a PC-based client option.

If you need support, the time difference from Eastern US to the UK can sometimes be a challenge, but the support team is absolutely great and will respond back to you outside of their normal working hours, assuming they aren't sleeping.

All support is initially done through an in-app chat bot that will recommend that you go read articles based on your questions. I will admit that most of the time, the recommended articles DO contain your answers, but I personally just like to call and talk to someone. I realize this would put a strain on their resources though, so I rate this as a very small negative. I would rather support maintain their current level of quality than be burdened with phone calls over minor issues. If you do have a major issue or prefer to speak to someone, you can ask for a call and they will call you.

When a pdf is is drawn properly it works great. Automatic counting etc. No I'm just trying to reach 100 characters

When a pdf is not drawn properly, i may as well count manually. Which is mostly the case.
Simple things could be added to improve experience, such as a plan multiplier for drawings that cover multiple levels.

Without the software we wouldn't be able to deliver the speed of work that we are able to do now

Sometimes the symbols don't import quite correctly, also doesn't like complex symbols exported from Autocad

Countfire is easy to use and the customer service team ensure this is always the way. I like how the information is collated and keep things organised.

I dont like how you cannot quickly check quantities without processing the take off then downloading. If there was a quick check function then that would be a lot easier for things like sending my luminaire enquiries before i complete my take offs. I understand the risk with not having the checking function doing this but i would be happy to take the risk. Matching overlaid drawings with the zone function is a tedious task and i got excited when i saw the overlay function appear but this function isnt great so zoning remains my least favourite task.