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 every package, every consultant, and the fees, connections, contingency and VAT already standing there. You are not designing it. You are filling it in.
It starts before you own the plot
From the first figure you write down to the workbook on the build you can look round.
Step 1 of 6
Write down what you can afford
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.
Step 2 of 6
A first pass on a plot
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. 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.
Step 3 of 6
The workbook is already laid out
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 prompts, not lines: nothing lands on your budget unless you put it there.
Step 4 of 6
Put in the prices you are given
A quote, a fee proposal, a bill: the figure you were actually given, on the line it belongs to. A line you have not priced stays blank. It does not quietly become nought, because nought is a claim that something costs nothing.
An hourly rate 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.
Step 5 of 6
Grouped the way the work is bought
Groundworks is a sheet because groundworks is a thing somebody quotes for. That is the same list the enquiries go out on and the quotes come back against, so a price lands on the line it was asked for.
Every band tells you how many of its lines carry a figure, counted against your own lines. Nobody is scoring you.
Step 6 of 6
The total, and what you said you could spend
Underneath the total sits the figure you wrote down before you started looking. The two are printed one above the other and nothing is done to them. No difference, no percentage, nothing goes red.
What to do about it is your decision to make, not ours to grade.
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 your home costs. Sixteen of those lines have no figure against them yet, and the sheet says so on every band as you read it.
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.
What you get out
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.
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.