"Unit Typical" function / Group takeoffs by area on page for phasing and enlarged unit plans

On architectural plans it's often necessary to break out a project by north/south phase, and in the context of multifamily construction, we're often performing takeoffs on an enlarged unit plan which shows a typical unit, instead of taking off the same exact unit dozens of times on the overall plan.

To explain that differently: Unit A3 has 3 of door type A and 300 LF of base. Instead of drawing that over and over and over and over on the overall floor plans, we're just going to draw it once on the enlarged unit type for Unit A3, then multiply that quantity by the amount of times unit A3 appears on the overall plans.

Other programs make this quite seamless. You can tie those quantities (3 door type A and 300 LF of base) to what is essentially a count takeoff item, and it will automatically do the math for you for every time you place the count takeoff for unit type A3. So if there is 10 of unit type A3, the takeoff report will automatically show 30 door type A and 3000 LF of base. If you make a change to the enlarged plan where you actually performed the takeoff for that unit, such as removed one door type A and add one door type B, that is reflected in the overall total which will then show 20 for door type A and 10 for door type B.

This makes updating plans due to revisions, addendums, or fixing mistakes very quick and easy. Currently I do this all on the backend on excel. It works, but it's a little time consuming. I do the takeoff for each unit type on their respective enlarged plan page, do a count takeoff for each unit type on the overall plans, and multiply everything together in excel, tying it all together with formulas as best I can so that I don't have to manually change the overall total if there's a change to one or two door types.

This gets difficult if there are multiple enlarged units on a single page. For this to work, I am required to be able to generate a report for the takeoff quantities per page. If there are two units per page, that mixes the totals together and throws off any math that multiplies those quantities by the quantity of that unit in the project. The workaround for this is to crop or duplicate the page and do the takeoff for each unit type separately. Effectively creating two+ different pages for each unit that appears on the same page. But then it makes a mess when there is a revision plan set uploaded, as these don't automatically get linked, and you have to manually add pages, tie them together, move takeoffs from one page to the next... which all of that really defeats the purpose of using a program to speed up and organize things for you, and is quite time consuming if there are 30+ unit types.

How other programs do this, is you can draw a box around an area, and that treats it as its own separate area that is counted separately from the rest of the page. This assists in this function here when multiple enlarged plans are on the same page, as well as if you need to break out pricing by north/south or some sort of other phasing, you can easily figure out the quantities by just drawing around the area to be included. That feature alone would speed things up significantly, even without making a full blown unit typical feature that calculates all of the math.