Earthwork takeoff that
reads the grades.

The volume is in the difference, not the pad

Earthwork is the one trade where the quantity you bid doesn't exist on any single line of the drawing. It's a difference. Existing grade is one surface; proposed grade is another; the dirt you move is the volume between them — cut where proposed is below existing, fill where it's above. You read that off the grading plan's two sets of contours and spot elevations, you tie it to the cross sections where the slopes get steep, and you balance the cut against the fill to see how much you import or export. Get the balance right and you've priced the haul correctly. Get it wrong and you've either bought trucks you don't need or run short of dirt halfway through.

Pilars reads the existing and proposed grades off the plan and the sections, works the cut and the fill, and shows you the balance — then carries the factors and the side quantities that turn a contour difference into a real, haulable number. It's the fast, reviewable front end to a dirt bid, organized so you can check the assumptions before they become tonnage.

Where dirt bids actually leak

Almost never the main cut. It's the adjustments around it. Swell and shrink first: a cubic yard in the ground (bank), in the truck (loose) and back in a compacted fill are three different numbers, and a bid that confuses them under-trucks the export or over-orders the import. Topsoil strip next — you peel the organic layer off the whole site before you grade, that volume hauls off or stockpiles, and it's routinely left out of a quick number. Over-excavation is the geotech's line item: unsuitable soils get dug deeper and replaced with engineered fill, and the depth is in a note, not on the contours. Utility trenches are pure volume too — every run of storm, sanitary and water is a trench with a width, a depth and a bedding section, and that dirt is excavated, bedded and backfilled. And then the haul math: import and export aren't the cut/fill numbers, they're those numbers after swell, shrink and the topsoil and over-ex adjustments — which is exactly where bids that skipped a step fall apart.

• Cut and fill from existing vs proposed grades, with the balance
• Swell and shrink applied by soil type for bank, loose and compacted
• Topsoil strip volume across the disturbed area
• Over-excavation and engineered fill from the geotech notes
• Utility trench volumes off pipe runs and trench details
• Import / export haul quantities after every adjustment

An honest note: 2D AI vs full 3D modeling

It's worth being straight about this, because dirt is the one trade where overselling AI gets people hurt. Pilars reads in 2D: it pulls grades off the grading plan, depths and slopes off the cross sections, and trench volumes off the utility profiles, and it gets you a strong working cut/fill number with a clean breakdown of topsoil, over-ex, trenching and haul — fast, and reviewable line by line. What it is not is a triangulated surface-to-surface 3D model. On a tight balanced-site job where every yard counts and the proposed surface is complex, you still build existing and proposed TINs and difference the surfaces — that's the right tool for a hard balance, and we won't pretend otherwise. Think of Pilars as the fast front end: a number to bid against, a sanity check on someone else's, and a complete material picture in minutes — not a replacement for the 3D model when the balance is the whole game. For the broader sitework picture, see our civil & sitework estimating page and the in-depth sitework takeoff guide.

What lands on your desk

You get a sitework takeoff that separates the things that get paid differently. Raw cut and raw fill, in bank cubic yards, with the balance called out — surplus to export or deficit to import. Then the same volumes carried through swell and shrink so the haul-off is in loose yards and the placed fill is in compacted yards, because that's what loads trucks and what the spec measures. Topsoil strip shows up as its own volume across the disturbed area, with a stockpile-versus-haul note so you can price it either way. Over-excavation and engineered fill come off the geotech callouts as a separate line, because that dirt costs more to replace than it did to dig. Utility trenches come as excavation, bedding and backfill volumes per run, pulled off the pipe lengths and the trench detail. And the haul math sits on top: import and export quantities after every adjustment, so the truck count is the real one, not the contour difference someone forgot to factor.

Every line points back to the sheet it came from — the grading plan, the section, the geotech note, the utility profile — with a confidence score, so the review is fast and defensible. Dirt is a trade where the post-bid argument is always "where did that number come from," and the answer here is a pin on the drawing, not a shrug. Disagree with a strip depth? Open the line and see the note it read. Think the over-ex is conservative? Adjust the soil call and watch it re-resolve.

The honest framing matters here more than in any other trade, so we'll say it twice: this is the fast, reviewable front end to a dirt bid. It gets you a strong working number, a clean material breakdown, and a sanity check on someone else's package in minutes. On a tight balanced site where the proposed surface is complex and every yard is the margin, you still build surfaces and difference them — and Pilars is there to get you to that decision faster and to keep the side quantities, the trenching and the haul math honest while you do.

Questions estimators actually ask