What's new in Steel Estimator Pro

The app bids real work every week, so it ships steadily. Highlights from recent releases, newest first.

October 2026

Auto Takeoff: the drawings do the typing

Automatic takeoff from PDF drawings. Open the structural set and Auto Takeoff finds beams, columns, and braces with sizes and lengths at 99% accuracy against hand takeoffs, reading schedules and plotted-text callouts automatically. Every member is marked on the sheet for review, then one click sends the takeoff into the estimate, or exports it to Excel and Bluebeam markups. Structural steel only: misc metals, railings, and stairs stay with their calculators.
Version 2.0. A full polish pass across all 25 tabs: cleaner menus organized into Analysis, Bid, and Shop, a clearer KPI strip, and plain English everywhere.
Capacity-aware lead times. Set your weekly shop capacity and the proposal checks its promised lead time against the actual backlog.
Addendum delta. Log an addendum against a pre-addendum snapshot, compare, and issue a revised proposal page.
Misc metals material list. The misc package broken out as stock to buy.

September 2026

A dedicated Demolition tab. Taking existing steel down is priced as quantity times hours per item at your field rates, with its own cost line, its own pay item on the schedule of values, and demo scope lines the proposal prints last.

September 2026

Misc metals break out by material. Scope lines on the summary can now split each misc item into its materials, derived from the calculator that built it, so a GC's breakout request stops being an afternoon of spreadsheet work.
The proposal picks its breakdown lines. Choose exactly which scope lines print; anything hidden rolls cleanly into Balance of Work.
Joist & Deck, RTU frames, and joist reinforcement are now first-class categories with their own scope lines instead of riding along as balance-of-work.
Per-code difficulty in operations mode. Stairs don't fabricate at a beam's pace: operations-based shop labor now carries difficulty per item code, not one flat rate for everything that isn't a wide-flange.

August 2026

DSTV (.nc1) import, validated against real production file sets: pieces roll up by mark, holes and copes feed the operation counts.
Size-band time standards. Minutes per operation by shape and size band, because a W12 and a W27 don't drill at the same speed.
Schedule of values line combining. Structural material bills as one line by default, with combine and split controls for everything else, and certified dollars carried correctly through the G702/G703.
Send Bid follow-up tracking. Submitted bids arm their own reminder ladder so quotes stop dying in inboxes.
Crane days derived from picks. The equipment tab can compute crane duration from the piece count, priced separately from field labor.
Shop overtime support and estimate unlock passwords for locked, submitted bids.

July 2026

Connection labor from real weld models. Fillet welds carry wrap-around returns per AISC minimums, editable per connection type.
Weld and Connections tabs price fit-up, weld inches, and connection bolts as their own disciplines, feeding shop labor in operations mode.
Misc detailing priced by unique drawings, not piece counts, with standards you can edit per category.
BOM import for detailer advance bills, reusing the same routing engine as the Bluebeam import.
Boot time cut to a fraction of what it was, and a grouped sidebar with type-to-jump navigation across all 24 tabs.

Ongoing

Close out a job and the actual hours feed back into the operation and detailing standards, gated so a single odd job can't skew your numbers. Every shop's copy of the app slowly becomes that shop's estimator.

The screenshots on this site are recent, but the app moves fast. Request a demo and see it live.