What Zones Do

The Zones module

A zone is a polygon you draw over part of a drawing — a room, a floor plate, a phase, a fire compartment — so that ZeroCount can tell you how much of your takeoff sits inside it. Without zones, every count and measurement on a drawing rolls into one total. With zones, the same markers are broken down by where they sit, and that breakdown follows the drawing into the sidebar, the cross-drawing summary and the Excel workbook.

Zones do not touch detection. Drawing a zone does not find any symbols, exclude any symbols, or change which part of the drawing is searched — that job belongs to Areas of Interest (AoIs), which live in the same menu but do something quite different. A zone only reads what is already there and reports it by location.

Key features

• Draw once, break down everywhere — a zone is a polygon with a name, a colour and an opacity. Every marker inside it is attributed to it automatically; nothing has to be tagged by hand.
• Zones view in the sidebar — switch the marker list from Detection view to Zones view and the same groups reappear under one section per zone, with per-zone counts and clipped linear and area totals.
• Works for every marker type — Detection and Count markers are placed by their centre point; Linear and Area markers are clipped so only the length or area inside the zone counts.
• The Uncategorized bucket — anything outside every zone lands in a final section whose label you can rename per drawing (for example External or Not in scope).
• Carried into Review mode and export — the cross-drawing summary lists each drawing's groups under its zones, and the Excel export gains one column per zone plus an Uncategorized column.
• Reusable as templates — a standard set of zones can be saved company-wide and imported onto other drawings. See Zone templates.

Next steps

Start with Creating and editing zones to draw your first polygon, then read Zones view to see how the sidebar breaks your takeoff down by zone. The Uncategorized zone explains what happens to markers outside every zone, and AoIs vs zones settles which of the two polygons you need when.