Quick Tip! Kits + Presets

Kits and Presets are two powerful tools to help aid you in your takeoffs. Once properly set up, they’ll save you a ton of time by preselecting material assignments and ensuring that related materials are included. Combining these tools takes your skill set to the next level.

If you’re not familiar with these features, or you’re new to PrebuiltML X software, here is a quick rundown:

Kits

Kits can be thought of as material groups. Say you want to include underlayment any time you call roof decking in the list. A kit can automate this for you. Here’s the Roofing Underlayment Application as a component for Roof Decking.

That’s it! Now when you choose this kit, you’ll get the Roof Decking that you drew, and an Underlayment material in your list. Just pick the product for the underlayment and it’s all done.

It’s easy to set up, but there are plenty of ways to expand on this. You could add more applications to the kit, like Shingles, and you could specify exactly which product gets selected for each one. Each component also has an input formula to calculate the quantities. In this case, matching the square footage of the roof decking is exactly what we want for the underlayment.

Presets

Presets allow you to define the all the characteristics and properties of a takeoff item and reuse them with one click instead of manually choosing an application, product, and related settings every time. If you regularly use Flush 4×10 Beams, you can save those settings as a Preset. Presets save all of the properties for your item: the Application, the Product, the Condition, Plies, Extensions, On Center Spacing…just about everything. Instead of repeatedly selecting those settings all the time, a Preset lets you call out your specific items by just right clicking on a drawing tool and selecting your Preset.

You can create presets for all the drawing tools, and even the markup tools, and you can be as specific or general with the settings as you want to be. Just give each preset a descriptive name and they’ll be ready to draw in a flash.

Kits + Presets

Presets work for any application in PrebuiltML X, including Kits! To get the most out of these features you’ll want your Kit to be set up with specific products and formulas in advance. If you leave these components unspecified to be more flexible, you’ll have to remember to manually select products in your Material Lists tab. But if you have multiple kits available, you can be as specific as you want and have all the products and formulas tailored exactly the way you want.

Create a preset using each of these customized kits and you’ll be able to estimate entire groups of materials with only a few clicks. The setup time for this is well worth it. Creating presets is simple, and many of the premade Kits just need an initial product to be chosen to be completely customized for your workflow.

Kits are the more advanced topic here so if you want more information on them, check out our awesome Kits Webinar on the Knowledge Base to see just how useful kits can be.