Recipes Recipes and more recipes in estimating, some people call them Buildups.
A recipe in PlusDesignBuild enables you to associate an “each” number for purchase from a lineal, square or cubic measure …Recipes have so many more uses EG customised naming of doors, Windows ovens toilets ETC ETC but for now we will stick to measures.
Here is a good example: If you had a 100sq slab of concrete and you need a poly membrane under that slab you’d most likely buy that membrane by the roll, not by the square measure. In the image below, you will notice that the roll size is 80 squares which essentially means you would have to buy 2 rolls (160sqm) of the membrane to complete the job. If you’d wondered how to do this it’s actually easy, and the same principle applies for everything. EG if you had 10000 metres of framing material come through in your estimate and you wanted to buy it in 4.2m lengths Simply choose m/Unit and type in 4.2, now PlusDesignBuild will give you an “each” quantity instead of a lineal measure, pretty cool don’t you think? :ugeek: …And next time you estimate it’ll remember and then you’ll go, oh man that was easy! 
It still blows me away how quickly I can do estimates from simply tracing plans.
Guys if you are having trouble getting exactly what you need, book in some training https://plusspec.com/online-training-2/, most builders are up and running in 2 one hour training sessions and I am hearing most are estimating 70% faster.
If you are using PlusSpec and you need better estimating software or even worse you are using another an old school system or Excel that’s disconnected from the plan and isn’t 3D, go to the PlusDesignBuild page and see what you can actually do with our latest software https://plusspec.com/plusdesignbuild/ It’s more than just estimating software, but it is very VERY good at estimating when you know how.