🏗 Construction Budget Tracker
Budget vs actual — by trade
Spending over time
Needs attention
Trades & budgets
edit in place| Trade | Budget | Invoiced |
|---|
Invoices
| Date | Supplier | Trade | Excl. VAT | VAT | Incl. VAT | Status | Notes |
|---|
+ Add invoice
Guide — from Excel file to overview in a minute
Press Template for the empty Excel file, or keep using one you exported from here earlier. Fill in Setup, your trades with their budgets, and your invoices.
Press Import Excel or drop the .xlsx anywhere on the page. A short report shows how many trades and invoices were read and what was skipped.
Bars show budget vs actual per trade, split into paid, pending and overdue. The timeline compares spending with the plan; the alerts list what needs action.
Click a trade for its invoices, change a budget in place, add invoices, or click a status badge to mark an invoice paid.
Press Export Excel to get the same simple four-sheet file, ready to share with your partner, architect or bank.
What the Excel file contains
No macros, no hidden tabs. Columns you add yourself are ignored on import.
- Setup
- project name, total budget, currency, VAT %, start and end date
- Categories
- one row per trade with its budget excl. VAT
- Invoices
- date, supplier, trade, amount excl. VAT, VAT %, status, notes
- Summary
- totals, written on export
Every invoice has one of three states.
- paid
- money has left your account
- pending
- received, not yet due or not yet paid
- overdue
- past its due date; shown first under Needs attention
Budgets are entered excl. VAT, so invoices are compared excl. VAT by default.
- excl.
- like-for-like with the contractor's quote
- incl.
- what actually leaves your bank account
How to track a construction budget, explained
A construction budget tracker answers three questions while you build or renovate: how much of each trade's budget is already used, how much is still to be paid, and whether the project as a whole is heading over budget. This page reads those answers from a plain Excel file. You keep the file as the record you share and archive; the page turns it into an overview you can click through.
Budget vs actual per trade
Each trade (shell, roofing, windows, electrics, plumbing, kitchen and so on) gets one bar. The bar's length is what has been invoiced so far, split into paid, pending and overdue, and the thin vertical marker is the trade's budget. When invoices pass the marker, the part above budget is hatched in red. Sort the bars by largest budget, percentage used, most over budget or most remaining, and click one to see its invoices and stats.
Spending over time against plan
The timeline adds up invoices by date: the cyan line is everything invoiced, the green line what has been paid. The dashed plan line spreads the total budget evenly from the start date to the end date. That is a simple reference, not a forecast: real builds spend unevenly, with big invoices for the shell and roof early on and finishes at the end. The dotted projection extends the average spending pace so far to the end date. Use both as a prompt to look closer, not as a prediction.
Excl. or incl. VAT
Quotes and budgets are usually compared excluding VAT, because that is how contractors price their work and because VAT rates can differ per invoice (in Belgium, for example, renovations of homes older than ten years can qualify for 6% instead of 21%). The overview therefore compares invoices excl. VAT with budgets excl. VAT by default. Switch to incl. VAT to see what will actually leave your bank account; budgets are then raised by the project VAT rate from Setup.
Keep a contingency
Almost every build meets surprises: soil conditions, price rises, a change of mind about the tiles. A separate Contingency trade of roughly 5–10% of the budget for a new build, and more for renovations of older houses, keeps those costs visible instead of hiding them inside other trades. If the project has no such trade, the alerts suggest one.
Importing your own Excel file
The importer looks for sheets named Setup, Categories and Invoices and finds the header row on its own, so title rows, a TOTAL row and instruction lines are skipped. Dates may be real Excel dates or text such as 14/03/2026 (day first); amounts may use a decimal comma such as 12.500,50. Invoices for a trade that is not in Categories are kept and the trade is added with budget 0, so nothing goes missing. After the import a report lists what was read; Undo import restores the previous state.
Privacy
The Excel file is read and written in this browser tab with the open-source SheetJS library, which loads from cdnjs. Your project is saved in this browser's local storage so it is still there next time; it is not sent to a server and there is no account. The page also loads cookie-free page-view analytics, which receive no budget data. Clearing the browser's site data removes the project, so export to Excel now and then as a backup.
More money tools
Work out repayments with the loan calculator, make invoices with the invoice generator, or count the days between two dates with the days between dates calculator.