Takeoff Agreement Benchmark
A switchgear takeoff to level gear quotes against: how often Makeoff's gear list matches a working estimator's, on 32 real projects.
Gear slice · type level · mean per project
Method
Leveling needs a reference list that came from the drawings and not from any vendor: the estimator's own gear takeoff. Producing it is the first pass on every bid and it is skilled work, reading the one-line, the riser and every panel schedule, and it is the pass that gets squeezed when six bids are due in a week.
Thirty-four projects were attempted and 32 were scored. They came from 13 electrical contractors who uploaded bid documents to Makeoff between March and August 2026 and attached their own takeoff to the project record. Every such pair on the platform that passed a document gate went into the set; none was chosen for how it would score.
Recall is the share of the estimator's gear that Makeoff also found: for leveling, the units the reference list would have to carry. Precision is the share of Makeoff's gear that the estimator also had: for leveling, whether the reference list is padded with units a vendor would rightly refuse to quote.
Results
The calibration set of seven projects, scored on the same rules, sits at 90.8% recall and 87.2% precision. It is lower than the reported set because it carries the hardest layouts and because it was never allowed to benefit from the review; it is shown so a reader can see that the reported number is not an artifact of tuning.
On found units the stated amperage or kVA agreed 93.5% of the time. Quantity agreed on 84.4% of found units, with the differences concentrated on the two vendor-quote projects.
Set
Recall
Precision
Calibration (7 projects)
90.8%
87.2%
Batch 1, harness alone (32)
97.2%
88.2%
Batch 1, after review (32)
99.2%
89.6%
Project by project
The mean per project is driven by many small jobs that agree exactly, and the pooled figure is driven by four large ones (Publix, The Bridge, Neurona, Prologis) that carry more than half the units. Both are shown here, after review.
Sorted by recall, then precision. Thirty of 32 projects reach 100% recall; precision is where the lists differ.
The median project priced two gear units. Four large ones carry more than half the units. Bubble area is the number of projects at that point.
Leveling in practice
Scoring Makeoff's list against a quote is the leveling job done backwards. What comes out is what a contractor leveling that quote would want to know.
Disagreements
Units the estimator priced that were not found: eleven of 210. They fall on six projects, and seven of the eleven sit on the two vendor-quote references, where the quote and the drawings disagree about how many units there are.
Units Makeoff listed that the estimator did not price: thirty-nine of 238, on 13 projects, classified by what the drawings say about each one.
Each block is one unit. Every disagreement is printed in the paper with its cause.
Gear slice, type level · recall / precision
Reproduce
The harness, its rule tables and their hash, the filed pairs and the reviewer decisions are published so the number can be regenerated by anyone with the files.
Harness
makeoff-bench 0.3.1
Rules hash
3e98800f311c
Regression tests
41, pinning the calibration projects
