Best practices for handling files over 50MB with Beam’s AI estimating assistant

Beam’s AI estimating assistant currently has a combined file size limit of 50 MB (up to 5 documents). If your estimate, plans, or PDF files exceed this size or amount, the assistant will not process them successfully.

This article outlines recommended best practices to help you work around this limitation while maintaining the highest estimate accuracy.

Why File Size Matters

Large PDF files (over 50 MB) can exceed the context window processing limits of Beam’s AI assistant. While it may be tempting to compress the file, compression can reduce image quality and text clarity, which may negatively affect AI estimate accuracy.

For best results, follow the recommended workflow below.

Recommended Approach (Best Practice)

1. Split the file into smaller sections

If your file is greater than 50MB, split it into smaller files and upload them separately. This allows the AI assistant to process each portion of the project individually without losing detail or quality. Common ways to split are by:

• Trade (civil, electrical, irrigation, demolition, etc.)

• Project phase

• Plan sheet ranges

2. Create separate projects

Create a project for each trade (Civil, Irrigation, Electrical, etc.). Upload the relevant estimate PDFs to the Estimating module in each project, and generate AI estimates for each trade separately. This approach keeps file sizes manageable and helps the AI produce more focused estimates.

Take an example of a large public park project at 123 A Street. In this case, there may be sections of the plans for civil and irrigation, so you'd make three separate projects with the same addresses but one named 123 A Street Civil and the other named 123 A Street Irrigation and the last named 123 A Street Master.

Upload the applicable portions of the divided planset documents into the 123 A Street Demolition and Irrigation projects respectively to produce bids for those scopes. Once they've been reviewed and edited to your liking, you can download the PDFs of each scope bid.

3. Combine bids into a master project

Upload those two files into the Master project and ask the assistant to produce a bid with exact sections, descriptions, quantities, and pricing from the two uploaded bids.

Alternative Option (if splitting isn't possible)

Compress the File

If splitting the file is not feasible, you may compress the PDF to reduce its size below 50 MB. However, this method is not recommended as the first option, because compression may:

• Reduce text clarity

• Lower image resolution

• Decrease AI extraction accuracy

Only use compression if splitting the file is not practical.