Door hardware takeoff software that keeps the spec in the room

A hardware set isn’t useful by itself. It matters because it belongs to a specific opening with a size, rating, frame, function, handing, and use case. If the set is copied wrong or contradicted by the spec, the error can survive until pricing or submittals.

Fresco treats hardware as part of the opening’s record. That gives the estimator a better review surface than a disconnected list of components.

Here’s Set 1.0 from the City of Santa Fe’s published Fire Station No. 2 specification, Section 087100. It’s the most complex exterior opening in the document. Five columns, no headers, reproduced as printed.

Set: 1.0    Doors: 109-1
6  Hinge (heavy weight)      T4A3786 (size/NRP as required)   US26D   MK
1  Removable Mullion         L980A                            US28    SA
1  Exit Device (storeroom)   10 16 21 43 AD8504 862           US32D   SA
1  Exit Device (exit only)   10 16 21 43 AD8510 862           US32D   SA
1  Mullion Cylinder          10 21 980C1                      US26D   SA
2  Surface Closer/Stop/Hold  351 CPSH                         EN      SA
2  Drop Plate                351D as required                 EN      SA
1  Threshold                 270A                             (none)  PE
1  Gasketing                 By Aluminum Frame Mfg.           (none)  OT
1  Mullion Gasketing         5110BL                           (none)  PE
2  Sweep                     315CN                            (none)  PE

MK is McKinney, SA is Sargent, PE is Pemko. OT is somebody else’s scope. Three things in this set cost money, and none of them is obvious at a glance.

An undecoded finish code. EN appears on 19 lines in this section. Article 3.8.C decodes manufacturers, not finishes.

A line that isn’t your scope. OT means somebody else buys it. Ten of the 34 live sets hand a line off this way. Exclude them in writing.

Blank finishes. Four lines here carry none. Section-wide it’s 83 of 233, and each one is a price you’re about to invent.

Door hardware takeoff software has to handle specifications that share a section number and almost nothing else. Three public standards, side by side.

Santa Fe hands you sets and the errors inside them: four doors assigned to two sets at once, and nine assigned to Set 8.0, captioned “(NOT IN USE).” Read that caption literally and you carry nothing for nine openings. Read the door list as authoritative and you carry 63 line items across nine doors.

Cornell publishes 23 sets and no finishes at all, zero US codes and zero BHMA numerics, with every hinge line in all 23 sets reading “3 Hinge As Required MK.” Add six proximity reader lines that say to get the model number by phone, and eight power supply lines specifying neither amperage nor voltage, and 43 of the 186 line items carry nothing priceable. Twenty-three percent.

Michigan State publishes no sets at all. Its 13 page section is Part 1 General, organized A through M by component type across nine tables. You match usage to a row and repeat that nine times per opening.

This is the most expensive question on the page, and the trade hasn’t settled it. Door hardware takeoff software that doesn’t ask which basis you’re working on will produce a wrong number that looks right.

Emilio Bendever, a working detailer, raised it publicly in 2025. His estimating platform submits total quantity across all openings in a set, and he wrote that he found the justification hard to accept “since every other program I’ve ever used shows the quantities per door. It’s very difficult for our customers and architects to review, when they have to do some math to determine if we have the correct quantity of per door.”

Lori Greene, Manager of Codes and Resources at Allegion, answered from the code side: “Unless something has changed, the hardware set should show the quantity per opening.”

Santa Fe’s own specification states it outright, that quantities listed are for each pair of doors, or for each single door. So the convention sits unsettled between the trade’s certifying body, its most-cited code authority, and its most-used software. Get it backwards on a 40 set project and every downstream number is wrong by a multiple, and nothing looks broken, because the figures stay internally consistent.

Related: getting hardware sets into Comsense faster and pulling the hardware schedule out of an 087100 spec.

Comsense and eMullion both price hardware against manufacturer price books, and those books arrive as catalogs somebody has to digitize, validate and load every time a manufacturer issues an update. Reviewing thousand page catalogs across dozens of manufacturers on a quarterly release schedule takes time. The trade’s own published accounts put a system price somewhere between a month and a quarter behind the manufacturer’s book. That lag is invisible in the output, and it compounds with every week between your bid and your award.

Two other things put a stale number in a bid. Items new to your database have no purchase history behind them, so a schedule where a seventh of the items are new isn’t one you’ve effectively priced before. And every line with no finish stated is a price you’re inventing. On Santa Fe’s 233 line schedule, that was 83 of them.

Metal input costs moved hard in the same window. Aluminum mill shapes rose 30.5 percent and steel mill products 17 percent over calendar 2025, both the steepest climbs since 2022, while the broader nonresidential input index rose 3.3 percent. Section 232 duties now apply to full customs value rather than metal content, and they don’t apply evenly: on a single opening you can carry a frame at one rate, a closer at another, and a lockset at none. Rates change, so confirm current status at hts.usitc.gov rather than working from a number you saved.

Put a date on the price book you bid from, in writing, in the proposal. Not the bid date, the price book date. More on keeping door hardware pricing current.

The value of AI in hardware takeoff is not pretending there are no judgment calls. It is finding the judgment calls faster. Fresco surfaces the conflicts and lets the estimator decide what to carry, qualify, or ask about.