Your first count — start to finish

What this guide covers

This is the golden-path walkthrough. By the time you reach the bottom you will have:

1. Signed into ZeroCount.
2. Created a project and uploaded a drawing.
3. Marked areas of interest and the legend.
4. Run automatic symbol detection.
5. Reviewed and tidied the results.
6. Exported quantities to Excel.

Pick a relatively simple drawing for your first run — a lighting plan or small-power layout works well.

1. Sign in

1. 1

   Open ZeroCount in your browser. The landing page is a login form.

2. 2

   Enter the email and password you use for Ensign.Software, then press Sign In. The button shows a spinner while it authenticates.

3. 3

   You'll be redirected to the Projects dashboard automatically.

More detail: Signing in.

2. Create a project

A project is a container for all the drawings that belong to one job.

1. 1

   On the Projects dashboard, click New Project .

2. 2

   Give the project a Name (typically the job name) and an optional description, then press Create.

3. 3

   The project opens automatically and you land in the Project View with an empty file list.

More detail: Creating a project.

3. Upload a drawing

1. 1

   In the empty project, drag a PDF onto the upload area, or click the upload area to open a file picker.

2. 2

   Wait for the file to finish processing. A spinner appears while ZeroCount loads the drawing into Redis and prepares it for detection.

3. 3

   The file appears in the Files list on the left. Click it to open it in the editor.

4. Set the scale (optional but recommended)

If you want length or area measurements alongside your symbol counts, set the scale before you start counting.

1. 1

   Find the scale indicator in the toolbar.

2. 2

   Pick a preset like 1:50 or 1:100 from the dropdown, or choose Custom to calibrate from a known distance on the drawing.

You can change the scale later — ZeroCount will ask whether to recalculate existing linear and area measurements when you do.

More detail: Calibrating a drawing.

5. Stage 1 — Mark AOIs and the legend

This is where you tell ZeroCount where to look and what to look for.

1. 1

   Open the AOIs and Zones panel . ZeroCount may have auto-detected one or more Areas of Interest — these are the regions of the drawing where it should search for symbols. Add, move, or remove them so they cover the working drawing but not the legend.

2. 2

   Locate the legend on your drawing — the box that defines what each symbol means. Make sure a legend marker covers it. ZeroCount will read the symbols out of this box and use them as templates.

3. 3

   When you're happy with the AOI and legend coverage, press Submit in the bottom-right corner of the canvas.

ZeroCount now runs the detection pipeline — symbol extraction, template matching, and grouping. This typically takes 30 seconds to a couple of minutes depending on drawing size.

More detail: AOIs and Legends.

6. Stage 2 — Review the detected markers

When detection finishes, you land in Stage 2. The sidebar on the right shows a tree of marker groups — one group per symbol type ZeroCount found.

1. 1

   Click through each group in the sidebar to see its markers highlighted on the drawing.

2. 2

   Look for false positives (markers on things that aren't real symbols) and missed symbols.

3. 3

   Delete a false positive by clicking the marker and pressing DEL.

4. 4

   Add a missed symbol by dragging a box around it with the Detect Symbol Marker tool — ZeroCount will look for more like it across the rest of the drawing.

5. 5

   To move a marker into a different group, drag it from the canvas onto the target group in the sidebar.

When the groups look right, click the Stage 3 indicator at the top to move on.

More detail: Marker types and Selecting and moving markers.

7. Stage 3 — Name, link, and zone

Stage 3 is the final tidy-up before export.

Name your groups

Each group has an editable label in the sidebar. Replace Group 1 / Group 2 with meaningful names like C-type fitting or Twin socket so they're recognisable in the export.

Link groups to database items (optional)

If you want costs in the export, link each group to a database item.

1. 1

   Click the database icon next to the group label.

2. 2

   Search for the item — by code, by description, or by browsing.

3. 3

   Pick the item. ZeroCount stores the product code and description against the group, and they'll appear in the Excel export.

More detail: Linking a group to a database item.

Set up zones (optional)

If you want the export split by room, area, or floor:

1. 1

   Open the Zoning panel in the sidebar.

2. 2

   Draw a polygon around each zone on the drawing. Name and recolour zones to taste.

The Excel export gets one column per zone, with marker counts filtered to each one. More on zones.

8. Export to Excel

You're done. Export the quantities.

1. 1

   With Stage 3 selected, click the Export button at the top-right.

2. 2

   Choose Export Quantities (.xlsx) .

3. 3

   The workbook downloads as {Project Name} - quantities-export.xlsx.

The workbook contains one sheet per file plus a Totals sheet that sums everything across the project. Each row is a group; columns include Scale, Type, Takeoff Description, Code, Description, your zone columns, Uncategorized, and Total Quant.

Full detail on what's in the workbook: Exporting a project to Excel.

What next?

You've just done a full count on one drawing. The next things worth learning:

• Working with multiple drawings in one project
• Merging duplicate groups
• Reusing detections across drawings
• Keyboard shortcuts