Switching from Cubit before your renewal: the plan

So when should you actually switch?

So the Cubit renewal's coming up, and the last thing you want is to change software with a tender half priced. Fair enough. Our answer is to switch before that renewal, because what you get on the other side is a takeoff that gets done for you. In Estimator+ the AI measures the whole drawing set after one question, and your estimators check its work.

The renewal date matters more than it sounds. Renew, and you're locked into another year of Cubit, whatever you decide in month two. Buildsoft's pricing page is plain about the term: "All Cubit Estimating subscriptions have a minimum 12-month term. Longer terms are available."

Here's the thing, though. Taken in order, the switch carries no tender risk. Nothing goes live until it's been tested on a job where you already know the answer, and each live tender stays in one system from start to finish. Estimator+ is billed monthly with no contract, so any overlap is paid month by month.

Okay, what's the order?

1. Find your Cubit renewal date and work back from it.
2. Save Cubit's reports for the jobs you want to keep.
3. Rebuild your trades and rates as company templates.
4. Retake a job you've already priced in Cubit.
5. Trace every difference back to the drawings.
6. Price one live tender in Estimator+ alone.
7. Handle that tender's addendum.

Start months before the renewal, not weeks. Seriously. The retake needs room to be done properly, and the live tender needs a real close date that falls inside your Cubit term. Picture being three weeks out and only just uploading drawings. Not fun.

Which old jobs are worth saving?

Buildsoft says Cubit can "Generate BoQ reports, trade breakdowns, and cost analyses in PDF or Excel." So run those reports before the renewal date, for every job you reckon you'll open again. We'd start with these:

• The last few tenders you won, and the ones you nearly won (you know the ones).
• One job of each building type you price a lot.
• Anything still in defects or carrying an open variation.

Keep the files you already own right beside them: the drawings as issued, every subcontractor quote and each offer you sent. Then ask Buildsoft, in writing, how you'd open old jobs once the subscription ends. Better to have that answer in an email.

An Excel trade breakdown is a record you read, and that's all it needs to be. Its whole job is to be the thing you check your retake against.

Why we'd rebuild your rates instead of carrying them

There's no Cubit import. Sounds like bad news, but we reckon it works in your favour. Buildsoft tells customers to "Build your master price lists and template jobs once". And a list built once and then added to for years ends up collecting lines nobody would write today.

Think about what an old list tends to hold. Rates nobody's checked since the supplier changed. Three versions of the one skirting line. And somewhere down the bottom, an allowance for a council requirement that has since lapsed. An import would carry every bit of that across. A rebuild asks one question of every line instead: would we price it this way on the next tender?

The rebuilt lines go into the company template library your whole team shares. A template adds rows to a tender with the tool and rate it was saved with. It never changes a rate that's already in the takeoff panel, so it can't overwrite a figure one of your estimators has set.

Start with a job you already know the answer to

The test that actually counts is one where you already know how it ends. So pick a tender Cubit priced, ideally one that took an addendum, so you know where its traps were and what the final number came to.

Upload the drawings as they were issued. Every sheet is read on upload and named from its title block, with its revision, at no extra cost. If you've ever spent a Friday arvo renaming sheets by hand, you'll appreciate that one.

Then ask for the takeoff in Claude Code or Codex, on the plan you already pay for. The AI reads the set and measures every sheet, at the sheet's printed scale, so every figure traces back to a shape on a drawing.

Drag in your templates and enter the old subcontractor quotes. The takeoff prices nothing unless you ask it to, and the AI can never pick a quote or set a margin. So the money in the retake is yours.

What if the numbers don't line up?

Probably not to the dollar, and that's fine. Put the Review tab next to Cubit's trade breakdown. Review shows each trade's cost, margin and cost per square metre, so a trade that's out of line stands out pretty quickly.

Where a trade differs, go to the drawing. Review mode writes each shape's line name right beside it, and each line can show the sheet it came from, so you can see what was measured and where.

Now, the honest catch. Some differences are there by design. The AI doesn't deduct, so a partition run goes straight through the doors and deductions stay your call. And a partition drawn at two printed heights becomes two lines, not one. Which, fair, can throw you if you weren't expecting it.

So matching totals was never really the test. Look, what you want to know is whether every gap can be explained from the drawings, by your own estimators, inside the tender.

Bring a second estimator into the retake too. You both work in the same tender at the same time, with nothing to lock, check out or merge.

Then one live tender, in one system

Keep pricing live tenders in Cubit until the retake's done. Then price the next one in Estimator+, from the drawings right through to submission. Don't run one tender in both systems. We get that it feels like a safety net, but a tender split across two systems has no single record of what was priced, and that's the bit that comes back to bite you.

If head office still wants a spreadsheet, no worries, export the full workbook. It carries every line with its picked cost and margin, the subcontractor comparison, and a transmittal of the drawings the price was based on.

Marking the tender as submitted saves a permanent copy of what went out. Every re-issue after that gets saved as a numbered revision, with a note on what changed.

What happens when the addendum lands?

Picture it's Thursday, the tender closes Monday, and the addendum just hit your inbox. That's the real test of the setup. Upload the revised sheets, and each one whose drawing number matches a sheet on the tender is filed as a revision of it, under the addendum's name.

The new sheet takes the old sheet's place, and the old one stays underneath where you can still open it. Your measurements and scale carry over. Flick between the old and new sheet, or highlight what was added, removed or changed, then redraw just what moved.

The quotes follow the same logic. A price entered as a rate is recalculated from the new quantity, and a lump sum stays exactly as the sub quoted it.

So by the time your renewal date comes round, your team has priced, submitted and revised a real tender in Estimator+. That's when we'd let Cubit go. Estimator+ as a Cubit alternative sets out the rest of the difference.

Bring the job you'd retake to a demo and watch the AI take it off.