Every cost on the build, on a sheet that was written out before you started.
Most self-builds are budgeted on a spreadsheet somebody made up as they went along, and the things that were never on it are the things that cost the money. This one opens with thirty-seven package sheets, a sheet for each discipline you might appoint, and preliminaries, fees, connections, statutory costs, contingency and VAT already standing there. You are not designing it. You are filling it in.
The front sheet of the workbook on the build you can look round. The section below is what sits behind each of those rows.
How it gets there
Nothing, to start
The workbook is already laid out when you open it: a sheet for every package of work, a sheet for every consultant you might appoint, and the preliminaries, fees, connections and statutory costs each on their own.
Real prices, as you get them
A quote, a fee proposal, a bill. You put in the figure you were actually given, on the line it belongs to. We never price the work for you and we publish no rates.
One package sheet, before anybody has priced anything.
Open the external works sheet and it is not empty. It carries way markers: the things that get charged for on that package, written out, each with the unit it is measured in, so you can see what you have not been quoted for yet. There are one thousand six hundred and sixty-nine of them across the workbook. They are ours and they are prompts, not lines — nothing lands on your budget unless you put it there.
The same sheet once real prices are in it. The empty rows stay visible.
A line you have not priced stays blank. It does not quietly become nought, because nought is a claim that something costs nothing and a blank is an admission that you do not know yet. Every band tells you how many of its lines carry a figure, counted against your own lines and never against a list of ours. Nobody is scoring you.
Some lines are not money at all. An hourly rate for a groundworker, or a rate for breaking out an obstruction, is an answer about what something would cost if it happened — so it sits on the sheet as a rate and is not added into the total. That distinction is the difference between a budget and a guess.
And it is grouped the way the work is actually bought, not the way an accountant would file it. Groundworks is a sheet because groundworks is a thing somebody quotes for. That is the same list the enquiries go out on and the same list the quotes come back against, so a price you have been given lands on the line it was asked for.
It starts before you own the plot
Written before any plot, and kept — with every earlier figure still underneath it.
Before you look at anything you write down what you can responsibly put into this, all in, land included. It is dated, and when you change it the old figure stays visible with the reason you moved it. That is the number everything later is held against.
The first-pass appraisal. We hold no rates: you bring one, and record where it came from.
Then, on a plot you are still deciding about, there is an evening’s work: a rate, an area, the land and buying costs, the professional fees, and whatever this particular plot demands that a standard one would not. It tells you what the plot is worth to you before you bid on it. We publish no rates and never will — you bring one from a source and record which source and when, because a price book goes stale on a one-year clock and the date matters as much as the number.
The appraisal is a first pass, and it says so. The workbook above is the second, and a measured take-off later is the third. All three are in the same record, so you can see what you thought this would cost when you bought the land.
What it saves you
A total is only worth what you know about the gaps in it.
The build you can look round has £885,040 on it across two hundred and seven lines. That is not what the house costs. Sixteen of those lines have no figure against them yet, and the sheet says so on every band as you read it: the packages band shows seventy-nine of its ninety-one lines priced, the preliminaries twenty-six of twenty-nine. The number at the bottom is the sum of what is known, and you can see exactly how much of it is known.
That matters at the point somebody asks you to decide something. Changing the roof covering is cheap in March and expensive in September, and the difference is whether you could see what it did to the rest of the sheet at the time.
Two figures, one under the other, and nothing done to them.
Underneath the total sits the figure you wrote down before you started looking, for what you could responsibly spend. The two are printed one above the other and nothing is done to them. No difference, no percentage, nothing goes red. You worked out what you could afford and you can read what the build is costing, and what to do about it is your decision to make, not ours to grade.
What you get out
None of it is trapped on a screen. Anything with numbers in it comes out as a spreadsheet you can work on, and the summary pages come out as PDFs you can send to a lender or a broker. You do not have to wait until the end of the build to take your figures out, and what you leave with at the end includes them anyway.
The workbook
The whole budget as a spreadsheet, every sheet, to work on however you like.
A summary
One page as a PDF: each band, its total, and how much of it is priced.
The appraisal
The first-pass appraisal as its own document, PDF or spreadsheet.