Major Kudos and a Christmas Wish List

I want to start by saying how impressed I am with this software. I understand what a massive undertaking it is, and it’s obvious the team is working incredibly hard. The test version already includes some major improvements that I’m excited to implement into our templates. We’re genuinely excited about ZZ Takeoff and confident we made the right choice adopting it. I also appreciate that feature development has to be prioritized based on demand while continuing to innovate.

Here are a few feature requests I wanted to share.

Estimator usability

My main goal is to make this easy for an estimator who may not be strong at building templates but understands what they’re looking at. If I can build solid, intuitive templates that make takeoffs straightforward and hard to mess up, that’s a big win for us operationally.

Customizable property panels.

I would love the ability to customize, reorder, or hide properties once a template is built. One thing I appreciated in PlanSwift was the ability to control what the property box looked like when opening a template. Ideally, I’d like to hide anything that shouldn’t be changed and surface only the few fields an estimator might need to adjust. This would reduce confusion and speed things up significantly.

Product list column visibility.

Currently, when I create a new column in product lists, it appears across all lists. It would be great to be able to toggle columns on or off per list. I know one time variables exist, but that approach feels a bit clunky when the same information needs to be reused across several lists, but not all of them.

Better product list organization

I’d really appreciate a way to organize product lists using folders. If grey folders already exist, I may be missing something, but having a clear folder structure would help a lot as templates and lists grow.

Scale and unit handling

This one may be more niche, but as a Canadian user it’s a bit painful. When creating a new project, having to choose metric or imperial before even checking the drawings means I often have to open the PDF separately, scroll to a scaled drawing, and confirm the units first.

Under the current workflow, this also means I need to maintain two sets of templates for essentially everything that isn’t a count based item. One set for metric drawings and one for imperial, even though the underlying logic is similar. That adds a lot of overhead and increases the chance of inconsistency over time.

A possible solution would be to still let the user choose metric or imperial, but if imperial is selected and the drawing scale is metric, automatically convert and scale it in imperial. That way, the workflow stays uninterrupted, templates can remain unified, and the scale just works regardless of how the drawings were issued.

Thanks again for all the work you’re doing. I’m excited to see where the platform continues to go and happy to provide feedback as we keep building on it.

Happy Holidays!