What’s New in Gradework 1.13
Smarter Assemblies, Symbols, and Reporting
Earthwork estimating runs on precision: get the material quantities wrong, misjudge a grading alternative, or lose hours to manual data entry, and it shows up directly in your bid margin. That’s the lens AGTEK is using for its latest release. If you’re an estimator, machine control modeler, or field team lead running Gradework, the 1.13 update is worth a close look. AGTEK recently walked through the release in a dedicated webinar, and the throughline across every new feature is the same: cut manual effort, tighten accuracy, and make it easier to get project data into and out of the systems your team already relies on.
Here’s a full breakdown of what’s changing, why it matters, and who should care most.
A quick recap: where Gradework has been headed
Gradework continues to build on its framework principle, extending functionality toward an integrated platform that carries a project cleanly from takeoff through modeling, production control, and reporting. Recent versions introduced features such as the new underground utility conflict detection, phased reporting, slope area reports and maps, and flexible estimating package integration, all aimed at making data more portable and consistent across teams and third-party tools. Version 1.13 continues that trajectory, but shifts focus to three specific pain points: complex material setups, custom symbol creation, and reporting that integrates well with other software.
Powerful new materials assemblies
The headline addition in this release is materials assemblies, a more structured, flexible way to define complex material setups and turn them into reusable templates. Historically, entering material data for anything beyond a simple vertical buildup of materials required a fair amount of manual, repetitive setup work, especially in areas with unusual geometries such as retaining walls, roadway wedges, complex footings, or retention structures. The new assemblies framework changes that by letting users:
- Build assemblies that support multi-layered materials, so a single template can represent a full material stack instead of one layer at a time of varying widths.
- Enter material information for footings, walls, highway batters, and other complex geometries as part of a structured assembly rather than piecing it together manually for each instance.
The practical upshot: once you’ve built an assembly for a given structure type, you can reuse it across the project, or across projects, instead of rebuilding the same material logic every time it shows up. That matters most for teams working on residential, critical Infrastructure, transportation, commercial, or civic infrastructure jobs where footings, retaining walls, and highway sections recur throughout a site. Less rebuilding and higher accuracy mean fewer chances for errors to creep into a quantity takeoff.
Improved reporting and data output
The second major thrust of 1.13 is reporting. AGTEK is expanding reporting capabilities so that output is easier to read internally, easier to hand off externally, and holds additional context to help decision-making. The improvements include:
- New borehole logging detail of moisture content and blow count is designed to streamline the management and visualization of subsurface data, helping understand geotechnical conditions to enhance the planning or earthwork operations.
- Improved visualization for data-driven project analysis: cleaner, more usable views of project data that make it faster to spot trends, verify quantities, and support decision-making during preconstruction.
- Improved data integration and open data access for third-party system integration: a push toward making Gradework’ s output easier to pull into whatever other software your business already runs on, whether that’s a bidding platform, a project management tool, or a client-facing reporting system.
For teams that currently export data from Gradework and then reformat it into another system, this update continues to improve interoperability. Open data access reduces the friction of that hand-off, and better visualization means less time spent manually double-checking numbers before they go into a bid package or a client deliverable.
Enhanced symbol creation and editing
The third pillar of this release is a reworked symbols editor, built to make creating, editing, and reusing custom symbols faster, particularly on large projects where consistency across hundreds of symbol instances matters. New capabilities include:
- Easier building and refining custom symbols, streamlining a task that has traditionally required manual setup.
- The ability to leverage AI-generated SVG symbols, letting users generate usable symbol graphics instead of building them from scratch.
The AI-generated SVG piece is another forward-looking feature in the release. It’s a signal of where AGTEK sees the platform heading: using AI to remove friction from necessary tasks, not the ones estimators want to spend their time on. For teams that maintain large symbol libraries for utilities, structures, or site features, faster symbol creation compounds: a small time savings per symbol adds up fast across a project with hundreds of them.
Who should pay attention
This release is aimed squarely at three groups:
- Estimators building bids that depend on accurate material quantities and clean reporting to win competitively.
- Machine control modelers who need consistent, reusable material and symbol definitions across complex 3D site models.
- Project managers and field teams who rely on Gradework’s output flowing cleanly into other systems for progress tracking and client reporting.
If your team touches any of those workflows, the improvements in 1.13 are built with you specifically in mind.
Why it matters
Taken together, these three areas (assemblies, symbols, and reporting) show AGTEK doubling down on what’s made Gradework a trusted tool for earthwork estimating (precision, speed, reliability) while pushing harder into automation and interoperability. As AGTEK Development President Matt Desmond framed it, the goal is to give users “more precision with less effort” in a competitive bidding environment.
That combination of faster setup, cleaner output, and less manual rework is what moves the needle on two fronts at once: winning more bids by turning around accurate estimates faster and executing those jobs more profitably once you’re on-site because the underlying data is trustworthy.
Getting access
Gradework 1.13 is rolling out as part of AGTEK’s ongoing product upgrade cycle. Existing customers with active maintenance or subscription plans will be notified directly when the update is available for download through AGTEK’s product downloads page. If your maintenance or subscription has lapsed, or you are still running Sitework 4D this is a good moment to check in with your AGTEK representative before the update lands.
If you want a deeper walkthrough before then, AGTEK’s webinar “See What’s New in Gradework 1.13” covers the release in more detail, with practical use cases and a live Q&A session with AGTEK’s product experts, a good option if you want to see the new assemblies, symbols editor, and reporting tools in action before they hit your desktop.
Want to see these features in action or talk through how Gradework 1.13 fits your team’s workflow? Reach out to your AGTEK representative or contact us for more information.