Only 22 per cent of US contractors said they could generate decision-ready information within hours.

CMiC and Dodge Construction Network surveyed 301 US contractors for Optimizing Project Controls for Contractors, a 2026 brief. General and specialty contractors, all working on non-residential projects. Only 22 per cent said they could generate decision-ready information within hours.

That brief is about project controls, cost and schedule across a whole job. But the phrase stuck with me, because on bid day a lighting count is decision-ready information, or it is supposed to be. The PM does not want a story about how the takeoff went. They want one number per fixture type, and they want to be able to trust it before it goes into the bid.

I'm 18 and I count these by hand at a preconstruction desk. The worst moment is not the counting itself. It's the moment late in the morning when the total on my sheet and the total I remember don't match. Type F came to one number on my first pass and another on my second, the bid is due at 2, and there is no way to tell which pass was right without doing it a third time.

That is the gap between information and decision-ready information. A number is information. A number you can check quickly, without redoing the work, is something you can decide on.

What LumenTakeoff does about it

The last screen in LumenTakeoff is Lock in results, and it does not start with the export. It starts with a reconciliation check. If the numbers don't reconcile, export is refused rather than exporting a wrong number. I would rather the tool stop me at 1:30 than let a bad total walk out the door at 2.

Before that point, the page summary keeps the figures apart. Production count, detected instances and in bid scope are shown as separate numbers and never blended. On the demo set in the screenshot that is a production count of 54, 56 detected instances in 6 fixture families, and 54 in bid scope. Those are not three guesses at the same answer. They are three different questions, and seeing them side by side is how you know which one moved.

Scope gets the same treatment. Families are separated into new work, existing to remain, relocated, demolition and unresolved. Where the drawing does not settle it, the family is flagged rather than assumed, so an unresolved family shows up as unresolved instead of quietly landing in the bid number.

When the check passes, you get one XLSX with Coverage, Quantities, Findings and Evidence sheets, plus proof images with every counted instance ringed. Coverage says which pages were counted, which were out of scope and which were unsupported. Evidence says where every number came from. If the PM asks why Type F is 41, the answer is a ringed image, not my memory.

Everything runs on the estimator's machine, and the counting is deterministic on supported vector sheets. Scanned pages are reported as unsupported, never guessed at.

The machine counts. You decide.

The machine counts. You decide.

See how electrical takeoff works in LumenTakeoff, or lighting takeoff software for fixture counts from PDF plans.